The Lost Echosodes
by Seafoam-Tainted-Memoirs
Summary: SPIN-OFF TO "3 Doctors, 9 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" set between Chapters 235 and 236. DOES NOT MAKE SENSE AT ALL IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT, SO IF YOU HAVEN'T DON'T READ THIS. Oswin and Clara's psychic excursion.
1. Introduction

_Introduction_

* * *

_This fic is a companion, spin-off fic to my other Doctor who fanfiction, "3 Doctors, 9 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?", set between Chapters 235 and 236. If you have not read 3D9CWCPGW?, do not read this one, because it will make absolutely no sense as you've basically skipped 400,000 words of plot and character development. This is solely written for people who are up-to-date and following my other one, and it will be limited to 14 chapters long, and if you read this without reading the other (still running) fic, you'll be a) very confused, and b) very irrationally angry and things like character relationships._

_HOWEVER, if you HAVE just come over from 3D9CWCPGW?, then this is the Oswin and Clara spin-off with just them in another psychic excursion. And no, it is not a return to the High School world I created for Chapter 148, "Life On Gallifrey". Every chapter is different, as you will see :)_


	2. The Case Of The Leather Apron

_The Case Of The Leather Apron_

_Clara_

Clara groaned and felt like she was lying on something cold and hard and like she'd banged her head and someone had punched her in the face. And then water was sloshed at her and she gasped and spluttered, flailing wildly, until somebody grabbed one of her arms and dragged her to her feet, where she stumbled and slipped in something.

"How did you fall asleep there?" asked a familiar voice. Much too familiar.

"Where..?" Clara grumbled, spiting out some of the water.

"And you were _fast_ asleep too, I had to get a bucked of pee to throw on-"

"WHAT!?" she choked, staring around. She collapsed into a wall behind her, and was faced by her 'favourite' (she used the term loosely) echo, Oswin Oswald. She coughed.

"Thought that would wake you up!" she shouted.

"Pee!?"

"No! Obviously it wasn't _really_ pee. You're my sister - in fact, you're _me_, why would I want to throw pee on you?" she questioned.

"Why _wouldn't_ you?" Clara muttered.

"Fair point. Yes, it was pee," she said.

"EW! OSWIN!"

"I already tried kicking you in the face! Stars, how much mead did you even drink last night to get kicked out of wherever you were drinking?"

"What do you mean last night? I was on the TARDIS, like, five minutes ago," said Clara, "And so were you. And 'mead'?"

"Clars. Look around. Does this look like we're on that spaceship of your husband's?" she challenged, crossing her arms. Clara glared, but finally examined her surroundings. There was Oswin, stood opposite her, and they were in a particularly grimy alleyway. To her left it just narrowed and forked in the terraced houses, so she couldn't see much through the gloom and the sooty air. To her right it opened up into a wide street, and the smell of manure and other refuse hit her like a wall. It was a street covered in hay and litter and other human 'waste', and suddenly it wasn't diffuclt to imagine her sister knocking on doors looking for a suitable bucket of pee to throw on her to get her out from under the awning of what looked like a pub. A Victorian pub. In London.

"Why are we in Victorian London? Why was I asleep on the floor in Victorian London? Outside a pub?"

"I don't know, but I'm not a hologram. And you know what that means?"

"Erm... We're in a simulator..?"

"Try again."

"But I don't wanna be stuck in my head again! So what, have I assumed the identity of Clara Oswin Oswald or something?"

"Dunno, you certainly look like you're in period clothes, all... oldy."

"That's not a word, Winny," said Clara sparingly, as if she were talking to a child. "And so are you, look, you're like, _covered_. For once." She then pushed past her dear sister in her bright red, eerily Victorian garb that actually reached her ankles, and looked out of the alley at the street, specifically at the pub. "Urgh, The Swan," she said disapprovingly, "why was I drinking _there_? They wash rags in the lager."

"How do you know this?"

"The same way I know your favourite milkshake bar is on Floor 97 of Titan Beta," she said offhandedly. "Seems a very low deck for a milkshake bar." She remembered that the higher the floor number, the lower down it was. There were rought 100 floors on the spacestation where Oswin had grown up.

"I... Okay, they have _really_ good milkshakes, the stuff about what they did to those cows was not true," said Oswin defensively.

"I didn't remember that part. What did they do to the cows?" she asked, looking suspiciously at her sister, who had been stood rather defensively, but who then rearranged herself and crossed her arms.

"Nothing," she said. "So what are you looking for?"

"More like _who_ am I looking for..." she said annoyedly.

"The Doctor?"

"What? No, of course not. Me. Well, not _me_. Clara Oswin Oswald."

"I thought you were Clara Oswin Oswald?"

"No, _I'm_ Clara Oswald. _You're_ Oswin Oswald."

"Ohhh. So she's like our child, right?" said Oswin.

"What!?" Clara rounded on her, "how could we even have kids? _You're _a hologram for a start. And we're both girls."

"What does that matter..?"

"What do you mean '_what does that matter_'?"

"Hang on, in the twenty-first century, same sex couples can't reproduce?"

"Not as far as I'm aware!" said Clara. Oswin scoffed.

"Time of apes..." she grumbled. Clara shook her head.

"We're also related," said Clara.

"Not _really_," said Oswin.

"Stop arguing with me, I do not want to bear your children and I can't believe we are even having this conversation, and oh look there she is," said Clara, pointing to where her Victorian self, who had just emerged from a carriage. She waved off the driver.

"Yes. Wonderful. We've found you. Now what?" Oswin asked her.

"I don't know! Maybe she'll... Well... I don't know, do I!?" she exclaimed quite loudly. She looked around in alarm to make sure her victorian echo had not heard. She hadn't, but she was walking away. "Come on." She walked off and her sister followed after her.

"It's so gross here," she said.

"It's not that bad," said Clara.

"Seriously? Can't you smell that? Poo mixed with industrial smoke and pollution? It. Is. Disgusting."

"Really? You're such a baby. It's a smell."

"Stars, you really are a time traveller aren't you?" she muttered as they rounded a corner and both of them nearly bumped straight into Victorian Clara, who was stood facing the corner as if waiting for them.

"In future, when yer followin' someone, I'd 'ighly advise..." and then she saw their faces.

"This is your fault," Clara snapped at Oswin, who just crossed her arms again and turned to face the other direction as Victorian Clara stared at them both.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"We're on the committee of the World Doppelgänger Club," said Oswin, "we were thinking inviting you to join."

"Do you think you could shut up?" Clara ordered her.

"Do you think you could wake up?"

"Do both of ya think ya could stop arguin' for five bloomin' seconds?" Victorian Clara shouted, and then she pushed both of them through a doorway next to her, "yer like bloody sisters." They both made noises of bitter agreement and glared at each other.

"We are. We're all-" Clara began.

"Think I don't know who you are? Course I do, I aren't thick," she said.

"Nobody said you were," said Oswin, and then she fell over. "Ow."

"'Ow did ya manage that?"

"She thinks she can fly," Clara said, "it's tragic, really. So, um, who are we?"

"You're me," said Victorian Clara, "and so's she. You were there when I was born though."

"I was?" Clara asked, kicking Oswin to make her get up off the floor. She stubbornly didn't.

"Yeah. Told me ta save the Doctor, but I dunno what that means," she said. "Then there was summin' about a time stream, I dunno. Maybe a soufflé."

"Makes sense," said Clara.

"Yeah, I saw it too," said Oswin, who was still on the floor.

"Bet the floor's dirty," said Clara. Oswin scrambled up instantly, pulling herself to her feet. She mouthed a curse word at Clara, who ignored her.

"It's rank here," she said.

"Oi," said Victorian Clara. "So, you're both from my future, yeah?"

"Yeah. Not your personal future, but the future. I was born in 1989," said Clara.

"Blimey," said Victorian Clara. "I'm Clara Oswin Oswald," she introduced herself.

"We know," said Oswin.

"Ignore her, she thinks she's a genius," said Clara, "I'm Clara Oswald. Just Clara Oswald." She shook hands with herself.

"And..?" she prompted. Oswin didn't say anything.

"Be polite, sister dear," said Clara coldly. Oswin grimaced. "Fine. She's Oswin Oswald. No 'Clara' in there."

"You're sisters?" asked Victorian Clara.

"Well, no, I suppose... It ended up getting too complicated having to keep explaining she was an echo of me. She's from... When _are_ you from?" she asked Oswin.

"Here I thought we'd moved past the clone stage," was all Oswin said. Clara gave her a confused look, but she was pretending to stare out of the window.

"I can't 'av ya runnin' round pretendin' to be me though," said Victorian Clara, "'Less ya think the 'iden'ical triplets' lie'll swing."

"I can't understand _anything_ you're saying," said Oswin.

"Please, ignore her," Clara said to her Victorian self, who was glaring at Oswin. She'd never thought that her echoes would have problems with each other, she only thought they'd have a problem with _her_.

"Righ'. So, 'ow did ya get 'ere?" asked Victorian Clara.

"Where are we?" Clara changed the subject, looking around the room they were in. It was small, and musty, and there were some steps down to a lower level in one corner, and on the other side was a stove.

"Old ware'ouse," she answered, "empty."

"And it was just unlocked?"

"Clara, I wouldn't go about questioning the coincidences of your own... of London," said Oswin, correcting herself just late enough for Clara to realise was she meant - that they were not _really_ in Victorian London.

"It's _always_ unlocked, thieves have taken ev'rythin' already."

"And no homeless people are seeking shelter?"

"Aren't many 'omeless up 'ere," she said, "Scared. And speakin' of that, I have a job 'a me own I hav' ta get ter... Maybe."

"What? You're just gonna leave us?" Oswin questioned.

"Yeah," she said.

"It's _fine,_ we won't get in trouble."

"Really? Okay..." said Oswin sarcastically.

"Neither 'a ya better move til I get back," she said, "then I'll move ya somewhere with a fireplace, some warmth. Cold nigh's these days." She looked rather haunted.

"What days? What's the date?" Clara asked.

"November 10th, eigh'een eigh'y eigh'," she informed, and then she left and shut the rickety wooden door behind her.

"Four years before she dies," said Clara.

"Why? What did she say?" asked Oswin, "her accent's really thick."

"Your skull's really thick. You know what she said, it's 1888. She's still twenty-one."

"Why? When's her birthday? Are you telling me I'm not even the oldest!?"

"Her birthday's November 23rd, 1866," Clara told her. "Why are you being like this?"

"I'm not being like anything."

"You are. Are you PMSing?"

"_What!?_ First of all why would you even think about that? Second of all we're in your head! Third of all I'M A HOLOGRAM! No I am not _PMSing_."

"You keep sniping her like she's done something wrong!" Clara said.

"I just don't like being stuck in your head again," said Oswin.

"Well if you're here too, it's probably _both_ of our heads'," Clara told her. "And you haven't bragged about being a genius _once_ in the last ten minutes."

"I haven't bragged about being a genius once in the last few _days_."

"You did, you said it last night when I asked how you got the memory ray off your boyfriend," said Clara matter-of-factly, "you were just like, 'I'm a genius, whatever'." She did the same sullen tone all her impressions of her sister took.

"He's not my boyfriend."

"You're dating him."

"Future tense. I will be dating him," she said. Clara laughed when Oswin gasped at what she'd said, "I MEAN, I'LL BE GOING ON A DATE. NOT DATING."

"Winny, that's what dating is."

"You don't go on dates," Oswin said.

"No, that's what _marriage_ is."

"Not dating. Don't wanna date him. He... smells... bad..."

"You can't smell," Clara said wearily. Oswin didn't appear to have anything more to say on the matter, and so it was dropped. Clearly, the matter of her status with Adam Mitchell was a sensitive subject, and an so Clara went about examining the room. Namely, the small staircase to a cellar.

"I wouldn't go down there," said Oswin.

"Why?"

"Time travelling with that husband of yours has left you way too curious, can't you stay put for once?" Oswin asked.

"Oh, come on, where's your sense of adventure?"

"It died with me," she said morosely. Clara gave her a look over her shoulder. "Clary, it's a _cellar_ in a _warehouse_, why are you so amazed?"

"Never know what you might find in a cellar," she said.

"Yeah, a homelessman, drugs, dead people, _nothing at all_. Realistically, are you going to find anything GOOD in that cellar there?" Oswin argued with her.

"Fine," Clara agreed eventually. "Boring."

"Or safe," said Oswin.

"So when are we going after my other self? Or exploring? Doing anything? I haven't left the TARDIS for ages," said Clara.

"You're still in the TARDIS." And then Victorian Clara came back, after not even a ten minute absence from the 'twins', looking furious.

"Bloody 'Ell!" she kicked the door shut, "Thought for sure today'd be it!"

"Be what?" asked Clara, now Oswin was staring out of the grimy window.

"_It!_ My way out'a these slums! It's dangerous for people like me these days," she said glumly, and then she went off down the stairs and pushed the door open. Clara tried to see over her shoulder, but it was too gloomy as she heard her Victorian self cursing.

"Should we go see if she's okay?" Oswin asked, peering over too.

"Thought you didn't care?"

"I never said that."

"You implied it."

"Doesn't matter, go see," she prodded Clara's shoulder and tried to shoo her off. Clara scowled but got up and cautiously went down the steps, into what looked like a makeshift house. There was what could well be a bed in one corner, in the form of a stag of rags and shawls and other such items, and then there was a single gas lantern on a box in a corner, next to it two loaves of bread, one of them half gone.

"You're gonna have to explain to us what's happening," Clara asked, Oswin following her so she was stooping on the step up, trying to see below the doorframe into the room. Hopefully that genius mind of hers was in full swing trying to figure everything out.

"_What's happening_?" she repeated patronisingly, "The 'ole bloomin' world knows what's 'app'nin in London Town. Or is it not impor'ant in the future? In 1989?"

"Actually, I left in the year 2013," Clara said.

"Do I look like I care righ' now? Nine months I've 'ad 'a this, livin' rough. Rose & Crown said they'd gimme a job, ha! Well that ain't bloody 'appened, 'as it? Just told me'a piss off _again_!"

"Why?" asked Clara. She knew that in three years at least she would be working a steady job at the Rose & Crown, and in four she'd be their best barmaid.

"Why d'ya think!? All this business at Miller's Court. Yesterday's news, I say, she's the fifth in as many months," snapped Victorian Clara. Then Oswin gasped behind Clara.

"Shit," she said, "Shit, shit, shit."

"Are you sure we're on the TARDIS? The swear filter doesn't appear to be working," Clara commented.

"Shit, Clara! SHIT!"

"So they're shut!" Victorian Clara said angrily, "for an 'ole day! I tell ya, in this bloody climate only the best can afford a day 'a no takin's, and they ain't the best, believe me. The Swan 'an't shut, 'as it!? They din't close for that 'Anbury Street lark the other month, did they? And that's a damn sight closer'n Dorset, ain't it? Oh, what's the bleedin' point of askin' you two, ya don't know owt 'bout this nonsense. Chilcott knew that damn ladybird too, and 'e _still_ stayed open. Dun't know this'n."

"That's a bit rude," said Oswin, "I think."

"Coming from the girl who just said 'shit' about fifty times," said Clara.

"I don't speak ill of the dead."

"Dead? Who's dead?" Clara asked.

"Bloody 'Ell! 'Ow do ya end up 'ere and ya don't even know about all these rackets? Mind ya, I met that pigeon a couple'a times, called me a mumper, and I am _not_ a bleedin' mumper, never mind the paddingken. Nemmos..."

"Really wish we had a translation matrix right about now," Clara said, turning to Oswin, who just shrugged pitifully.

"It's just that nobbler again an'all! They ain't found 'im yet, they ain't gonna find 'im! Same bloke who's 'bin lurkin 'bout the Chapel for the best part of a year. He could 'old a candle to the Devil though, so I ain't surprised. That's what Chilcott said the blue bottles say anyway," she told them.

"I didn't understand any of that," Clara said.

"Are you a nickey!?"

"Erm... What's the right answer?"

"CLARA WILL YOU LISTEN FOR ONCE!?" Oswin shouted.

"Keep the noise down, or the gegors'll think I'm a mandrake," snickered Victorian Clara. "Again." Although nobody knew what she'd just said.

"We are in _Whitechapel_, in _1888_," said Oswin, "This is when Jack the Ripper was around."

"Shit," said Clara.

"Exactly!"

"We need a newspaper," said Clara, "do you have a newspaper?" she asked Victorian Clara.

"Me? I've got two tokes to my name righ' now," she replied. Clara stared blankly. "No, I ain't got a paper, alrigh'?"

"Hang on, did you say the fifth?" Oswin asked.

"Yeah, Kelly. Number five."

"That means he's stopped killing," Oswin told Clara.

"There were more murders after this one! There were all those torsos in the Thames, weren't there?"

"Torsos!? If this is my future I don't bloody wan' it!"

"Whatever," said Clara, "what do you know about the murders?"

"Wha', all of 'em?"

"_Yes_, all of them," snapped Oswin.

"Well, I 'appen to pay attention ter this when it comes up, good for girls like me 'a be in the know," she said.

"What do you mean, 'girls like you'?"

"Toffers, tails, whatever you call it," she said ashamedly, "You know, _'ores_." Oswin and Clara both made groaning noises at this unpleasant news, but she supposed it wasn't surprising. Although maybe she wasn't surprised because she still held the memories from Victorian Clara's life. But one thing she knew for sure was that she didn't die in 1888 and she wasn't killed by Jack the Ripper. But if she really was working as a prostitute in White Chapel, she was at serious risk. Or someone else was. "That's why I keep goin' back ter Chilcott, I need that job. And now some other judy's dead and he's closed the damn bar!" She went over to the second of the two boxes in the room and pulled out a flagon and a bottle of something or other.

"Did you say you knew one of them?" Clara asked.

"Aye, Chapman. I knew 'er a smidge. This September just gone, bumped int'er 'er outside the Swan, gave me a dir'y look. Rose din't like her, neither," said Victorian Clara, pouring a drink with something that didn't look or smell very enticing.

"Rose?" they both repeated.

"Tyler, yeah," said Clara, "One of us lucky enough ter land a proper job, she's 'bin bu'erin' up Chilcott for months now. Anyway, I was talkin' 'bout her to Rose in the front of the Rose & Crown, Chilcott comes out 'n starts sayin' how much he respec's her or summin'. I think he was 'er regular, to be frank. Asked 'round, too. Not that anyone wants to say much in this business, but Bob's a bloomin' landlord an' 'ere he was, givin' that Annie Chapman all 'is wages! The others weren' 'appy 'bout that."

"Then what?" Clara asked, enthralled by this version of herself's apparent taste for gossip and ability to talk for hours.

"Well then she croaked it, din't she?" said Victorian Clara. "Week after that other gal, Mary Nichols, got them mu'ilations and died, too. Down on Buck's Row - nasty place that though, I wun't go there at night. Ain't nuffin' whot 'appens til the thirtieth, then _BAM!_ Two, gone like that." She clicked her fingers and had another swig.

"What _is_ that?" Clara asked her.

"Cleaner'n the bloody wa'er 'round 'ere, tha's for sure..." she grumbled.

"Yeah, the double murder, what happened there?" Oswin disregarded the alcohol chatter.

"Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. Now, those two, they ain't said a bad word about anyone. Far as I'm concerned they din't do no wrong - did not deserve ter go like that. Lizzy go' lucky though. Well, lucky as they come. Din't take out none of her lady parts."

"Eurgh," said Clara.

"Exac'ly. Then we go over a month with nuffin', we all think it's over, an' Mary Kelly turns up in bits with 'er organs in a ke'le yesterday mornin'. Tell ya what though, I dunno where she got the money for a ke'le, or where she'd be gettin' money for tea, or milk. Or bloomin' sugar! I think she was stealin' from-"

"Yeah, yeah, I don't really care that you think she stole money so she could buy a kettle," said Oswin. Victorian Clara glared at the fact her gossip was cut off.

"Then tha's all I know. 'Cept someone told me they thought Catherine was knapped by some mobsman, but that's just a rumour an' I stay above all that."

She took another swig proudly as Clara cleared her throat, looked away for a moment and quietly mumbled, "_Clearly_," so only her sister could hear.

"Ya'd be better talkin' ter Rose or the pigs if yer gonna be investiga'in'. I would, but I have a job," she said.

"What, getting drunk and shagging people?" Oswin snapped. Even Clara was shocked by that level of slander, coming from her sister. Coming from someone who was meant to be not dissimilar to her. And it was directed at someone _else_ who wasn't meant to be dissimilar to her.

"Yeah," said Victorian Clara coldly after a long while.

"Oh great. Now we're investigating Jack the Ripper. Totally not dangerous," said Oswin.

* * *

"Okay, so," said Clara as they walked through the streets, leaving her Victorian echo in what Oswin has snidely remarked upon as being a 'hobo-hole'. "We've clearly been brought here, to this exact day, the day after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, for some reason."

"You mean _you_ brought us here," said Oswin, "do you even know where you're going?" she asked as Clara just walked through the large throngs of people.

"I do if I don't think about where I'm walking and just go with the flow," she said. "What's your actual problem with Victorian me?"

"Oh, _Victorian me_, is it? So, before I showed up was I known as _Dalek me_? Is that what you called me? 'I remember Dalek me'," she said.

"What? I don't even know what point you're making, Winny," she said.

"She's a prostitute, Clara! A _lady of the night_," said Oswin.

"I fail to see how that makes her a bad person! She's just trying to get by, these times are hard, especially for her," said Clara.

"Yeah, I _bet_ they are," snapped Oswin.

"You shut up or I will start talking about how funny it is you got your brain taken out and put in a hate-filled genocidal machine. Or was it already in a hate-filled genocidal machine?" Clara said.

"Oi! I am _not_ hate-filled," she said. Clara had easily succeeded in offending her. "Or genocidal for that matter."

"But you are a machine?"

"Sort of, actually, yeah. There's a thin line between Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence," she said.

"Yeah but, don't you need intelligence in the first place for either of those to apply?" Clara said in a pretend-confused voice. And then Oswin kicked the back of her leg from behind her. "OW!"

"ANYWAY. Give me one good reason why they'll even let us _near_ the body? Or why you want to go near the body? Or why we're even doing this?"

"I'm not going to the crime scene! I'm going to the Rose & Crown!" she said, "you think I want to see a massacred, dead body of a woman?"

"I don't think she'll be there anymore you know, I think they'll have taken her to the morgue," she said. "Not that we're going to the morgue either, I don't really want to hang out with mutilated corpses."

"_You_ were a mutilated corpse once," said Clara.

"Wow, thank you, oh sister of mine, for such kind words," she said, her words drenched in sarcasm. "So, say we find Jack the Ripper. Then what? He'd probably kill us."

"Well, we'd probably restart like a video game."

"And have to keep replaying so we don't die!?"

"Yeah, like a video game."

"What video game!?"

"The Matrix."

"Oh, _yeah_, because they had _so much fun_ in the Matrix. Which wasn't even a video game, it was a computer program," said Oswin. "From a film."

"That's what a video game is, right?"

"And you only got one 'life' in the Matrix. You die in the Matrix, you die in reality. This is the Matrix. And that makes you Neo."

"Forgive me, but I'm not seeing any codes wrapping around the buildings yet," said Clara.

"Clara," Oswin took her elbow and turned her around, "_Do you actually have a plan_? Because I'm a genius, and I don't have any idea what the hell we're supposed to be doing."

"Alright, no, I've got no clue! We have no TARDIS, no gadgets, no handy alien who knows everything. We have nothing but some parallel version of Rose who probably doesn't know anything that could help us do whatever we're meant to be doing!" Clara said, giving up whatever façade she'd been imparting.

"It would be super helpful right now if we had a handy bag of useful gizmos. Like a whisk," she said.

"No, Winny, not a whisk."

"What about Emergency Soufflés?"

"_I don't think people actually have those_," she whispered. Oswin looked genuinely shocked an appalled at this news.

"Okay then, just, I don't know. My hologram-ness back would be good? Access to my personal cloud?"

"Your what?"

"It's the database I save all my memories and blueprints and whatever else is on my holoscreens to," she explained, "It'd be useful considering it has the entire history of the human race on it."

"How much memory space is that?" Clara asked, astonished.

"I call it... An Osabite," she said proudly.

"That's stupid."

"It's also what it's called and I invented it so shut your mouth," said Oswin, "and I would quite like it back." And then a bag fell out of the sky and smacked her on the head and Clara laughed as it slid off onto the floor. Oswin picked the bag up and veered into another alley to escape the crowds and onlookers before opening it. They seemed to be attracting interest for some reason - like identical twins hadn't been invented yet.

"What's in the bag?" Clara asked. Oswin was rifling through it, "is it transdimensional?"

"Erm... Yes... But only a bit," said said, her arm sinking down further than it was supposed to with a bag of that size. As long as nobody started pulling lamps out of oblivion, it should go unnoticed. "Ow!" she hissed, dropping the bag.

"What?"

"It shocked me!" she gasped, affronted that a bag had attacked her. Clara frowned and picked it up. The first object she found she pulled out: the Eleventh Doctor's sonic screwdriver, gold and green.

"The bag?" Clara asked, eyeing the tool.

"No, the screwdriver," she said.

"It hasn't shocked me," she said, turning it over, "where do I put it?"

"I'm sure your Victorian echo has a few ideas," said Oswin callously.

"THAT is uncalled for and ridiculously offensive, I hope you know," said Clara. Oswin stuck her tongue out. "Honestly. What else is in here..."

"Ow. Ow. Ow. Owowowowowow. OW. OWOWOWOWOW!" Oswin said, each one of her 'ow's getting more extreme. Clara looked up and saw her sister's eyes glowing bright blue.

"What? What's-" and then there was a pulse of electrical energy that smashed into Clara and she stumbled back a few feet, and then Oswin was just holding her head.

"That wasn't fun, Clary..." she grumbled.

"Karma. Serves you right."

"It wasn't karma, it was my interface downloading itself back into my bloody head," she said, and then she waved her hand to conjour up a screen. And on that screen was Clara's school photo from when she was twelve.

"WHY DO YOU HAVE THAT!? AND PUT IT AWAY! They might think it's witchcraft or something," she hissed warningly. Oswin sighed and vanished the holoscreen.

"I'm not even a hologram..." she grumbled, "I just have my screens."

"I think you should try and float again," said Clara.

"Nice try. Who knows what kind of gross stuff is on this floor?" she argued. Clara gave her a flat stare, and continued her rummage whilst secretly testing her own augmentations, and if her superpowers world in nineteenth century London. Alas, they did not, just like the mind patch.

"Oooh, juice," she said, pulling out two sports bottles filled with purple liquid, "do you think they refill?"

"Are you sure that's juice?" Oswin asked carefully. Clara pulled the sports cap up with her teeth.

"Blackcurrent," she answered definitively. And then she pulled out a book entitled _A Journey In Ripperology_. "Look, something useful."

"And the fact I have the entire internet through all of spacetime in my head means nothing to you?"

"Ah, look, wedding ring," she said happily, pulling out the thin gold band, holding it up to the light to see that 'Closwiwald' was still engraved on the inside. She put it on her middle finger and continued her search for her engagement ring, too.

"I wouldn't advise that," Oswin said, knowing what she was looking for, "You'll get mugged."

"...Okay, you're probably right..."

"I _am_ right. Considering the fact everyone thinks the both of us are paid whores, they'd be a bit shocked if you were wandering around with a diamond like that. The police might stop you too. Not to m-"

"Yes, yes, you can stop now, I get it. Should I dirty my finger then so the ring looks cheap?" she said.

"I'm sure the Victorian can give you a few hints on dirtying your fingers." Clara sonicked her and she reeled like she had an electric shock. "OUCH!"

"Serves you right," she snapped. "You're slut shaming. Isn't that sort of thing abolished in the whenever-you're-from?" Oswin glared at her as she rubbed ground-muck on the golden band on her ring finger.

"I'm not slut shaming - otherwise I would slut shame you, Clary."

"You _do_ slut shame me," she said. "Ah-ha, psychic paper. Ooh, _two_ psychic papers. That's useful." She gave one of the leather wallets to her sister, who took it very guardedly, in case it electorcuted her as well. "And money. Not that I know what _any_ of these coins are..."

"That it..?" she asked.

"It's a damn sight more than what we had before, now come on, the Crown's around the corner," Clara put everything back away again and walked out of the alley.

The Rose & Crown was situated in a shabby locale, a near-derelict, hay-strewn road in front of it because it had little connections to the important parts of London. Somehow, Bob Chilcott still managed to rack up a lot of business and keep a respectable establishment (no matter what rumours were pooling at his feet under the suspicious eyes of the night women). And as 'luck' - or the fact Clara was mildly lucid dreaming - would have it, Rose Tyler was leaning out the back door and throwing out rubbish. And then she shrieked when she saw the two Oswalds.

"C-Clara..?" she asked. Obviously, this Rose did not know anything about time travel or mysterious Doctors or blue boxes rocketing about the sky.

"We're PIs," Oswin whispered, stepping forward andproducing the psychic paper. "Good day, we represent Oswald & Oswald, we're investigating the recent killings in the area?" She'd dropped her usual northern drawl completely, and replaced it with that of the upper-class Londoner.

"Oswald & Oswald..?" Rose asked, "you don't 'appen to know... Another one? An' I can't read, so you should probably just put that away." Oswin nodded curtly and put away the wallet. Rose's accent was only a tad thicker than what it actually was, which made her far easier to understand than Victorian Clara, unless they shared a dictionary.

"Oh, you know our sister?" Oswin asked, acting pleasant surprise well. Then Rose glared.

"'Ere, you don't half sound poncy, and being able to afford fancy dunnage like that, when your bloody sister's out there with her translators! Are you coming to the Rothschild?" And then Oswin stepped forwards angrily and her accent changed from prim-and-proper too a (poorly executed) copy of Victorian Clara.

"Alright, this is all ream swag. Don't dare leak this to the rozzers, or I'll 'ave ev'ryone know you're a nose."

"Eh?"

"My sister, she's a bit nickey, a _lushington_. Family secret. I've 'bin cartin' 'er 'r'and the Chapel for weeks, Clara ses we can come 'ere for lodgings, we've been in an' out of packs. Nobody'll take us, not with 'er bein' like that," Oswin said. _Oh great, _Clara thought, _Now I don't know what ANYBODY is saying..._ '_I said you're a drunk and we have nowhere to stay, and that our clothes are nicked_.' 'Oh, excellent...' '_At least the mind patch is working again_.'

"You already lied! Clara expects me ta trust a muck-snipe and a leg?"

"Yeah, she does," said Oswin coldly.

"Bleedin' 'Ell... She'll be the death of me, that girl. Ain't you been in the lump hotels? They're finding it difficult to get dollymops these days, what with that killer about."

"I'd rather not get stuck in that line of work, if I'm honest," she said. Rose muttered something, but actually invited them in. '_Don't say anything._' 'I wasn't planning on it.'

"What did she bloody send you 'ere for? We ain't got no rooms, she knows that," muttered Rose, checking to see if Chilcott was around. And then suddenly the tolling of a huge bell rang through the air and struck just twice. Big Ben, Clara decided, saying it was two in the afternoon. It alarmed Oswin, but Clara, who'd lived near enough it to hear it for a year, took it in her stride.

"Sorry, we'll be out'a yer 'air soon as this'n sobers up," Oswin apologised, "but what do you know about these murders?"

"Ain't polite to talk about them in a kitchen," Rose hissed.

"The 'ole place's shut, who's gonna 'ear us? Cer'ainly not my sibling." Clara stated vacantly into space and pretended to be drunk, or simple minded, whatever Oswin had called her.

"What do ya wanna know about 'em for? Best you forget all about it and go about yer business."

"I 'av a professional curiosi'y," said Oswin.

"Did you know one of 'em or somethin'?"

"Maybe I did. I know a toff who din't like that Kelly girl, 'eard she owed 'im money or summin'," said Oswin, "old family _aquain'ence_, ya know the sort?"

"Yeah."

"Mmm, 'elped our father out with sum debts," said Oswin.

"A punisher?"

"Aye, one 'a them lurkers," she confirmed. '_I said we know someone who beats people up if they don't pay their debts_.'

"She was borrowin' money? That's how she got the kettle... Bleedin' tail..."

"I dunno the circumstances 'a the 'ole thing, mind, but this bloke's definitely dangerous, I'd 'ate ta see anyone else come to 'arm from 'im," she said.

"Them girls've been cut up though. 'E know how to cut like that?"

"Father wos a butcher," Oswin told her.

"You 'av to tell the jacks!" Rose exclaimed urgently. Who was Jack and what was he to do with this? The Ripper? Why would they tell the Ripper they knew who he was? '_DETECTIVES, Clara_.'

"I can't, not 'less I know for sure, who were the other girls? See if I know their names, or owt suspicious?"

"There was Nichols, that was in September. One off crime, the papers said apparently. 'Ere, I shouldn't say this," Rose leaned in and whispered, "I could lose my job. But Chilcott was talkin' about debts and whatnot last month, and then Annie Chapman turns up dead with all her insides on the street and I don't 'ear no more about it, but there were a few chink missing from my pay for a bit." 'DID YOU JUST MAKE ALL THIS UP _CORRECTLY_!?' '_Bear in mind we don't actually know any debt collecters so it's all useless._' 'I'm sure the police would love to know.'

"I 'eard about them, yeah," Oswin agreed.

"Then Cath and Lizzy both croaked it. You heard that someone got 'er knapped?"

"Did, yeah," said Oswin, "Dunno who though."

"No-one does, no-one knows if she really was, either," said Rose, "now the freak's taken the evidence." 'What are we talking about now?' '_Rumours that someome got Catherine Eddowes pregnant._' 'Maybe it was your imaginary bailiff.' "Dunno why he din't cut up Lizzy though."

"Perhaps he got confused?" Oswin suggested, "Killed her, realised she wasn't Catherine, and then left before mutilating her?" Then Rose frowned at her. 'You lost your accent.' "Or summin'," Oswin amended.

"Anyway, that's all I know," said Rose, "Ya'd be better off finding a blue bottle to talk to." 'Ah yes, the insects are in on it.' '_Police, Clary._'

* * *

"Good day, we represent Oswald & Oswald, we're investigating the recent killings in the area?" Oswin introduced them both with the same posh accent she had before. They were standing in the main desk of Scotland Yard with psychic paper at their disposal, while Clara silently prayed that there would be no nineteenth century misogyny to deal with.

"Right, yeah. Move along," the officer said. And then Clara flashed her own psychic paper at him, willing something to come up that would give them access to case files. His eyes widened at whatever it said. "This way, ma'am, and ma'am." He bustled around his desk and lead them away somewhere. '_What did you show him?_' 'No idea.'

And then they were in a room full of files.

"Less on duty on a Saturday - a lot took the day off after the Ripper murder yesterday," he said, going to fetch a box.

"Suspects, please," Oswin requested of him.

Ten minutes later, they were both searching through several boxes of files of over 2,000 individual murder suspects.

"'Hey Clara,'" Clara said aloud. Oswin looked up. "'What did you do when you were stuck in your own head?' 'Well, Chin,'," she continued, much too chipper, "'My sister decided it would be really fun to go through files for hours on end.'"

Oswin gave her a flat stare for a long moment. "Ha. Put the debtcollecters _here_," she said, pointing to an empty space on the desk.

"I mean, this is almost as fun as my hen night, _sis_."

"You didn't have a hen night," said Oswin. Clara stopped what she was doing and looked at her until she got the joke and glared.

"Exactly. Right. Debtcollecting off loan sharks is not in the formal sector. Why would it be on their records?"

"Criminal record, notes, stuff like, _unemployed_, anything like that," she said.

"Winny, double check the actual records," Clara said. Oswin said nothing and continued. "Winny. Oswin!" She looked up.

"What!?"

"Cross. Check. The. Records."

"They didn't have computers in the nineteenth century, there wouldn't be records of the suspects," said Oswin.

"Well the made-up one will be the Ripper," Clara said.

"Clara, unless you have every Jack the Ripper suspect memorised, then _all_ of these are probably made up," she said.

"We have a _mind patch_. That means we're linked, which means some of this is your head. And you have the entire history of everything inside your head."

"...You're right. I'll cross check..." Oswin said bitterly.

"What was that?" Clara smirked.

"You're right."

"I'm sorry, I can't... Did you say I was right?"

"Yes."

"Am I mishearing?"

"Drop it, honestly, you have some of my brain in your head so that's probably why."

"You couldn't let me have this one, could you?" Clara said irritatedly as her sister refiled everything and then started browsing the 'entire history of everything ever' on her holoscreens.

"Well I would have but you - I'm hungry."

"I... What?"

"I'm hungry. What do Victorians eat that's hygienic?" she said.

"I don't know!"

"Why!? Go ask your echo," she said.

"She's over forty minutes away."

"Well... I don't know. Buy her food too."

"I'm not gonna buy food."

"There must be a market - it's Saturday. They must have a market."

"That's Sunday, market day," said Clara.

"_Well so!?_ I'm hungry!"

"Go get your own bloody food! I'm not your mother, am I?"

"You are a bit," said Oswin.

"What? No I'm not - you have a mother. I know you do. A proper one."

"Well you created me."

"I'm not your mother."

"Are you telling me that you're not hungry? Go flash something at one of those police officers then and get them to get us food. Doughnuts," she said.

"Cops from the 1800s did not eat doughnuts. And flash what? The psychic paper?"

"If you like, but I was thinking of something else."

"I hate you, I'm going to kill you when we get out of here if you don't shut up but _fine_. Have fun on your own in a dark room full of files."

"I will! And I'm already dead."

"You always come out on top, don't you?" said Clara sarcastically. The fact that you were dead shouldn't be a magic card to pull out to win arguments. But Clara just grumbled as she tried to remember which coins were which and what food was even available in the impoverished, East End of London over one-hundred years ago.

Big Ben chimed that it was four o'clock, and already darkness and industrial fog was thick as she wanted around almost-aimlessly, before deciding to take Oswin's advice and offer Victorian Clara food in exchange for telling her where the food was, and meandering through the dirty streets back to her abandoned warehouse. A paddingken, whatever she'd called it. '_It means a tramp's lodgings_,' Oswin thought to her, but Clara ignored her.

But then she heard shrieks from around the corner and paused. The street was empty. And she knew the shriek all too well. She decided to stay and listen in on whatever was happening, her hand reaching into the bag next to her and tightening around the Doctor's sonic. It wasn't a weapon, but maybe it was dangerous-looking to scare somebody off.

"D'ya 'av the feckin' chink or not?" said a gruff, male voice.

"No! I thought I'd 'av a job, but I don'!" Victorian Clara pleaded, "Not a penny to me name, mister, I swear it!"

"Ya said ya'd 'av it, ya leg!" he shouted, and then it sounded like he hit her. Clara peered around the corner and saw a tall, sinister gent trying to corner her Victorian self, facing the opposite way. And she took action. But action was not anything very fantastical, because she held up two fingers and mouthed, "_Two hours_."

"Two 'ours, I swear on my life this time!" she said, gaining confidence when Clara held up a five pound note from the end of the street, and then she quickly ducked away before she could be seen by the assailant. "Back 'ere, 'onest, I'll nick it if I 'ave ter. Please, I'm beggin'!"

"Yer lucky I'm still tired from Thursday, buor," he growled, "Two 'ours, or I'll find ya, and ya know wha' 'appens ter the girls what I find, don't ya?"

"Yes, yes, I do!" she said, "Two hours! When the clock strikes six, right 'ere!" She went on with assurances for a while, and Clara heard him walk off a way that wasn't going near her.

"Where'd ya get that finny?" Victorian Clara demanded, storming back around the corner.

"Calm down, I didn't have it this morning," she said, assuming finny meant money or something similar. "Here," she gave the five pound note to her counterpart.

"'Ow do I know yer not a bit faker?"

"A what?" '_Someone who gives out counterfeit money_.' "Oh. Just because I'm not, okay?"

"What do you want for this?"

"I need you to tell me where I can buy food," said Clara. '_Ask her to tell you about the demander_.' 'The what?' '_The guy who was just asking for money!_' "And also about that demander just there."

"Oh, 'im..." said Victorian Clara, leading Soufflé Girl away from the scene of the attempted-mugging.

"Yeah. What did he mean he was tired from Thursday?" Clara asked.

"I dunno and I aren't gonna think abou' it. I give 'im money, 'e keeps me safe from the Ripper," she said.

"How? He knows who the Ripper is?"

"I dunno! Someone must, mustn't they? Look, why are ya askin' me? I told ya what I know," she said. "You gonna buy me this food?"

"What? Oh. Yeah, sure..."

"Where'd ya get this chink from?"

"The, err...?" '_Money._' "Oh, the money. No idea. Just sort of appeared. It's complicated. Timey-wimey, you know. So you went out looking for someone to pay to protect you?"

"Ain't you never 'eard 'a pro'ection rackets? They attack me if I don't pay. I 'av ta. It's 'im, or the Ripper."

"How do you know he's not the Ripper?"

"I don', but I reckon s'long as I keep payin' 'im, 'e won't kill me," she said. "What sort 'a thing's this, anyway?" she said about the screwdriver Clara hadn't realised she was holding.

"This? It's a sonic screwdriver. It unlocks doors," she said, "it's not mine anyway, it's the Doctor's."

"And 'e just gev you it? This 'Doctor' bloke I've 'eard so much abou'?"

"I guess so."

"Who is 'e?" she asked.

"The Doctor? He's my husband, we're married. We had a wedding. It was legal this time," she said, accidentally confusing Victorian Clara.

"You 'ad an illegal weddin'?"

"I don't remember, I was drunk."

"Blimey."

"It's a long story, but we were both drunk, and then our friends held _another_ wedding for us. So we've been married twice," said Clara. "The second one was legal. I think..."

Victorian Clara took them straight to a bakery, and bought some vast quantities of bread with Clara's seemingly endless money source. Clara had remarked about the fact she was made to steer clear of the white bread, and then she'd been told in a hushed tone "_Ya don' know whot they put in it ter make it whi'e"_. And then she'd just shut up.

"If we get some meat as well, can make a sandwich," Clara said.

"_Mea'?_ By God, aren' I rich!" she beamed like a child. "So, this 'usband 'a yours. 'E's a rich doctor, is 'e?"

"He's not really a doctor, he just calls himself _the Doctor_. He likes to help people," she said, then she laughed, "he's really not rich at all. He has no money. At all. Steals _everything_. Seriously, I don't know if anything he owns is bought. Some of it's gifts though. He's... also... an alien."

"A whot?"

"From space, another planet, up there in the stars," Clara pointed up.

"All I see is the London Par'icular," said Victorian Clara. '_The smog_.'

"No, all the way up into the sky."

"You've been inter the sky?" she asked as they went into a butchers looking for cold meat. Clara hoped none of the Ripper's organ-trophies were going to show up in the wares. _Don't buy any kidneys_, she reminded herself in her head.

"Oh yeah," said Clara, "It's beautiful - the stars. There's this planet, it's completely covered in grass. There's one huge river that runs through it with all these little streams coming off and they reach around it all like claws. And it's almost flat, and it's summer all year except for one month where it completely freezes over, and it's unchartered, so the snow is undisturbed."

"Sounds amazin'," said Victorian Clara. "Oi, 'ow much is this 'ere pork?" she shouted at the butcher. He gave the price which Clara did not pay attention to, and then she almost cleared the shop of ham. And then they went to find butter, which came in a wab and some paper, and then they returned to Scotland Yard and got Oswin to discreetly lead the identicals back into the file room.

"Really? It took you this long to get sandwiches?" Oswin criticised upon returning with a bread knife from some corner of the station.

"Come on, it's Victorian London, in the East End. What were you expecting?" Clara said, eyeing the butter curiously. It smelled good enough, and she hoped she wasn't going to die from the scavenged sandwiches. She noticed Victorian Clara had bought far more food than they needed, and decided she was probably going to take it all for herself when they left. If they left. Stars, she hoped they would be able to leave at some point.

"I don't know. Something?"

"This is something. Do you not have sandwiches in the future? You just have dodgy milkshakes?" Clara threatened.

"Seriously, Clars, it's not funny, you ever go to Titan Beta do not mention milkshakes or try and buy any milkshakes. _Seriously_," she said. Clara was a little freaked out, and Victorian Clara was a little confused as to what a milkshake was owing to the limited cuisine of the 1800s. "It's like prohibition."

"Prohibition? With milk?"

"_No_, with _shakes_. Yes, obviously with milk!"

"Why?"

"I'm not getting into the politics of it."

"...Met the Ripper," Clara said.

"'E ain't the bleedin' Ripper, and you'll do well just ta stay out 'a 'is business," Victorian Clara said. "There ain't no proof he done any 'a that."

"What's his name?" Oswin asked, looking to either of them for help. Clara just shrugged, and Victorian Clara remained silent. "Oh. You don't know. Why would you not know the name of... Who is he?"

"A debt collector," said Clara, "like you said. A protection racket, for... erm... women of the night... Hang on, why were you drinking in an illegal milkshake bar?"

"ENOUGH ABOUT THE MILKSHAKES. Okay. Protection racket? Right. Threatens to kill you if you don't give him money? Hides his identity? Right."

"He also said that he was still tired from Thursday," said Clara.

"The fifth murder? Right. Yeah. Okay. Well. It looks like..."

"Does your 'usband approve of you hun'in' serial killers then? Wun't 'e 'ate to see ya get 'urt?" said Victorian Clara.

"Why are you protecting this bloke?" Clara asked her, ignoring the question. The answer was no, the Doctor probably wouldn't like it if he found out his wife was hunting down Jack the Ripper, and that she'd done more in a day than the police and eccentrics had done in over a century. Well, he might like the last part. But the Doctor wasn't there.

"Well he's done all this to five girls and there's all the stuff about those unidentified torsos showing up in the Thames and Pinchin Street, she's probably terrified."

"Wha' _uniden'ifjed torsos_!?"

"Oh... Well... Doesn't matter," said Oswin. "I can't believe you don't know his name. Honestly, what sort of idiot does dealings with someone if they don't know their name?" Clara cleared her throat loudly. "What? You're an idiot too."

"Oi!" Clara objected, "I am not! And I _do_ know his name, actually, because I read it in a book he had out and open on the page that said his name in the TARDIS library on a stand with a light shining on it with the door unlocked."

"_Right_. That's a bit incredibly ridiculous."

"It's true. Anyway. Moving on. He's gonna meet her in an hour back over near the... whatever warehouse thingy," said Clara.

"_Says the girl with the English degree_."

"Why does everyone always bring that up when I say strange stuff?"

"Because you'd expect someone qualified in English wouldn't describe something as the 'whatever warehouse thingy'," said Oswin.

"Says you, you can't explain anything."

"Because I don't do _words_."

"No, you do girls," snapped Clara.

"Ha ha. She does," Oswin pointed at Victorian Clara.

"She does what? Words?"

"No girls. That's what she laughed about earlier, being a mandrake. Means she's gay."

"You-!? Ugh. _Why_ am I not remotely surprised..." grumbled Clara. Her Victorian echo was pretending not to pay any attention at all to the conversation. "We could just call the police and tell them to go there and wait?"

"No, he'll see, and then kill her, obviously. This is something we have to do ourselves."

"That's so cliché."

"And then we'll cut his arms off and throw him in a river."

"No, Oswin, we won't do that. _Then_ we'll get the police. Clara will get a reward, and she'll get hired by Chilcott. Probably. I don't know," she said.

"You're missing the fact someone has to knock him out," said Oswin. "A prolific serial killer. Knock him out. We're three women."

"So?"

"He's really tall and we're all really short!" she said.

"You're scared," said Clara.

"Well he probably carries a variety of surgical instruments around with him and murders women, so excuse me if I'm possibly mildly terrified of_Jack the effing Ripper_!" she exclaimed. And then she sighed and sat down, crossed her arms and legs, looked the other way and pouted.

"So wha' are we gonna 'it 'im with?"

* * *

_I did not think this through, I did not think this through, I did not think this through!_ Clara screamed in her head. Okay, why hadn't she listened to Oswin?

Oswin had left her and her echo to fight Jack the Ripper, and said they had a stupid plan. Well, that wasn't true. They didn't have a plan in the first place.

"SERIOUSLY TAKE ALL MY MONEY!" Clara ducked another slash from the long knife in the hand if her assailant. Victorian Clara had run off to get the police as soon as he'd shown up, so all Clara had to do was not-die for as long as it took them to get there.

"I don' wan' yer feckin' dimmicks, coiner!"

"That's fine! No dimmicks then! What would you - EEK!" she dodged again, "like instead?"

"YER LIVER!"

"It's funny you should-" DODGE "-say that, because I-" DUCK "-know someone who works as-" DIVE "-a very respectable cannibal butcher!"

"STAN' STILL!" he said. It was at this moment Clara thanked her stars that she wasn't wearing heels.

"I CAN GET YOU A REALLY GOOD BOGOF ON KIDNEYS!" she shouted, and then she brandished the Doctor's sonic screwdriver at him, stepping back when he was confused. And then she lobbed a sports bottle at him and it sailed pitifully past his head and purple was splashed over the cobbles. And then she switched on the sonic. _I REALLY WISH I HAD SUPERPOWERS YOU KNOW. TELEKINESIS WOULD BE GREAT RIGHT NOW. SO WOULD INTANGIBILITY. ANYTHING REALLY._

The knife flew out of his hand into the wall and lodged itself there. He stared at his palm, and then at the screwdriver.

"WITCHCR-" he bellowed, and then there was a loud thwang of metal hitting something hard, and his eyes crossed and he fell to the floor, breaking his nose on the ground. And behind him stood Oswin Oswald, holding a frying pan, and staring in shock-horror at the body on the ground. Clara stared back at her.

"Did you just knock out _Jack the Ripper _with a _frying pan_!?" Clara demanded. Oswin nodded slowly, and then they heard shouting and running and Victorian Clara, and Clara ran off, pulling her dumbstruck sister with her by the elbow.

* * *

"The Doctor's never gonna believe this one," said Clara. She, Oswin, Victorian Clara and Rose were sitting in the back kitchen of the Rose & Crown, after retelling most of the tale to Rose. Oswin remained silent for the whole time. Apparently, catching Jack the Ripper was quite the feat. Although it was sad they hadn't really caught him. She could hear the Doctor now, rambling about it being a fixed point in time, or that really the Ripper was an alien studying life. Although it was rather strange it _wasn't _an alien, going by her past encounters with... everything.

Bob Chilcott had run earlier in to announce the glorious news of the capturing, and had proceeded to offer Victorian Clara a job, which was excellent. But now it was nearly ten o'clock at night and there was very little sign they were going to be leaving.

"What do we do now?" Oswin asked aloud. Clara had thought after they caught the most prolific serial killer in history the hallucination would be over.

"Maybe we weren't here to catch the Ripper?" Clara coined aloud.

"Well then what?" asked Oswin. Clara shrugged. It wasn't long before Victorian Clara and Rose divulged into gossip again. Clara was wondering if in the real world she'd been unconscious for hours. Maybe longer. She wondered how worried her husband was. Her sister seemed preoccupied with something too.

"What's on your mind?" Clara asked her when the other two started conferring more theories about the local working-class women.

"Doesn't matter," said Oswin. Clara had a sneaking suspicion it was Adam Mitchell, but it had been a crazy enough day without more Adwin-drama wrapped up in the chaos. So she didn't ask any more. In fact, there was very little to speak about. Or very little they wanted to speak about. So when Victorian Clara showed them where they could sleep (which happened to be in her own little hobo-hole now she'd 'moved'), they went gratefully. Clara was sat against one wall, the floor damp and bloated from last week's rain, and Oswin sat on the opposite wall of the room, cosied up in the corner holding her knees close.

"Well this is more than a little dank and uncomfortable," said Clara boredly.

"You just want to be back in your fancy bed with your fancy husband," said Oswin.

"'Fancy'? The Doctor?" Oswin said nothing. "What's wrong with you today? Did something happen last night? Were you lying about your Extreme Makeover marathon or whatever it was?"

"No."

"This is what I was talking about last week - you don't tell me anything. You're just completely emotionally shut off," said Clara.

"Yeah, well..."

"Come on, you're supposed to be my sister."

"But I'm not, am I!?" Oswin blurted out. "I'm you. I'm not even you, I'm a reflection of you who has emotional and social issues."

"That's not-"

"It is true, and you know it is."

"You're not less of a person, you're a genius."

"So what if I'm a genius? Great! But you know what I learnt in my year on the Alaska, standed in the Dalek Asylum? I learnt that equations and computers are no substitute for humanity. And I said to myself, I said, 'When you get out of here, you're gonna live'. And I didn't get out."

"You did, you're here now."

"And I'm dead, so I'm a reflection of myself, who is a reflection of you. I'm a ghost, just like all your echoes. We're all ghosts to you, we must be nothing," said Oswin. Clara stopped and looked at her, looking for a trace of irony, anything that would give away if she _knew_ she'd quoted her back to her.

"You're not that," said Clara eventually, deciding she didn't know, "you're a person with a second chance at life - only with superpowers this time."

"You're not my sister, Clary," said Oswin, "It's like... It's... It doesn't matter."

"It's like what?"

"_It doesn't matter_."

"Just tell me, or you know I won't stop asking."

"Why don't you just go into my head and pick the answer out if your so damn desperate to know?"

"You know I won't do that."

"Maybe you should."

"Oswin Oswald, tell me what 'it's like'."

"That name trick will not work on me and you know it." Clara remained silent, and just watched her. "FINE, it's like your my mother."

"I - _what!?_"

"You created me! You created all of us! _You_ did!_You_ sent us out on our fatal mission, all of us dying in the Doctor's place to save his life."

"I died to save him too! But _he_ saved _me_ afterwards. I could have died in his time stream."

"Well no-one came to save the Victorian, did they? Maybe... Maybe Jack came and brought me back to life, but what about the rest of them? They just die, do they?"

"Everybody dies, Oswin," said Clara.

"Clearly everybody doesn't because I'm still here, your still here, Jack's still here," said Oswin, "everybody doesn't die. You see us as equals, but we're not."

"Yes, _we are_."

"Fine. I'm going to sleep," and then she turned away into the wall so Clara couldn't see her face. But she didn't think Oswin was going to sleep, or that she had the intention to sleep at all.


	3. The Case Of The Marlboro Conspiracy

_The Case Of The Marlboro Conspiracy_

_Clara_

It was freezing cold and it was raining were the first two facts Clara recognised when she started gasping for air, like air had been taken from her. She fell onto her hands and coughed up nothing, her bleary eyes opening to see she was on all fours in a puddle and her palms and knees were stinging with sediment in the grazes she'd inflicted when she lost her balance moments before. She coughed onto the back of her hand and stumbled when she stood, dizzy with a throbbing head, leaning back on the wall behind her and taking in what was around her. It was dark and it was an alley, and it was the middle of the night, but when she looked up and orange glow encompassed the vicinity from electric lights. Her breath clouded in front of her. To her right the alley went on and darkened to absolution, and to her left a loud road was clearly in view, with old-fashioned streetlamps and the works. She breathed deeply, coughed again and sniffed her running nose. And then she caught a glimpse of the back of her hand and saw the blood. Her nose was bleeding. She patted down the pockets of the long, dark coat she was wearing until she found a tissue, and then held it to her face.

"Oswin?" she coughed, looking around the bleakness. And then her sister tripped out from behind a wall, sodden and dishevelled and wearing an identical long coat - only hers was bright red.

"Oh my stars, your nose is bleeding," said Oswin, rushing over. Clara waved her away.

"It's fine, I think it's stopping," said Clara, "it's probably just the psychic stuff..." she sniffed back blood and tasted it at the back of her throat, which made her cough again. "Where are we?"

"I don't know. You're coughing a lot. Are you sick? Are you alright?" Oswin asked her urgently.

"Yes... Fine..." said Clara, trying to stop her sister medically examining her face. "You're being weird, stop."

"I'm not being weird," said Oswin, crossing her arms. Clara stepped back again to widen the distance.

"You are, you're acting like you care about me," said Clara.

"I do care about you," she said nonchalantly, and then she walked off towards the main road. Clara watched after her and then examined her darkening tissue, before following.

"You care about me, _yet you are intent on destroyong my face_?" Clara questioned.

"Tough love."

"Oh, now you're bringing _love_ into the fray?" Clara said. Oswin peered out around the corner, "what are you doing?"

"Seeing where we are, Clary," she said, "But carefully."

"You're just a ball of paranoia, aren't you?" said Clara, standing back from the cartoonish way Oswin was being 'careful'.

"It's called being safe, something you wouldn't know about being from the twenty-first century," said Oswin.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Only that in my time there were far less unwanted pregnancies," she said snidely.

"I'll push you into the road, you know I will," threatened Clara, but Oswin was silent like she'd seen something. Clara stared around gor anybody 'strangely' resembling either of them. Clara saw a car trundle by slowly, and Oswin watched it.

"Great..." she muttered to nobody in particular. Clara waited for an explanation, but as usual her sister decided explanation was not necessary. Or forgot somebody else was there who wasn't following her train of thought to the letter. Clara dabbed her nose again impatiently, and found the flow had stopped.

"What is it?" she asked eventually as Oswin kept watching the road intently.

"What's what?"

"What's 'great'?"

"Nothing, I was being sarcastic. Possibly. I don't know a lot about America," she said.

"Well now I understand completely."

"Watch the cars, Clars," rhymed Oswin, walking away from the road as another, yet identical to the previous one, went by slowly. She searched her pockets as Clara watched two more identical cars drive past, with only their blemishes separating them. "Which one do you think's the original? It probably died to save a lorry."

"Oh be quiet, you're such a baby," said Clara, getting bored as another black car came past and searchig her own many-pocketed coat. She found the Doctor's screwdriver, which was apparently now a staple accessary. She also found a clump of dollar bills with faces of old men she didn't recognise stamped across them.

"Ooh, cigarettes," Oswin chirped, "I was thinking about taking up smoking you know, being immortal and that. Just for show."

"That's a dumb idea," said Clara, "they wouldn't even work for you. You'd need special electronic cigs or something."

"Maybe I'll invent some."

"_Lung disease for the dead_, I can see the slogan now. Please don't make those, you'd be even more unbearable than usual," said Clara.

"You can bear me just fine, sistery," she said, examining the Camel Lights closely. "No pictures of gross lungs on these packets, wow. Nothing to put you off. Weren't the Roaring 20s glorious? You were alive then, right?"

"I was born in 1989, how many times do I have to mention?" she questioned, wiping some rain blots off her face.

"Right, and I was born in 5096. So you _weren't_around in the 1920s?" Oswin asked. Clara gave her a dumbfounded look, the supposed genius who apparently couldn't do maths properly. She resumed searching her pockets and found another pack of cigarettes and a matchbook. The pack of cigarettes wasn't new, either, it had about four missing. She coughed again, and Oswin laughed. "Would that be a smoker's cough, hmm?"

"Don't be stupid, I quit smoking years ago," said Clara, "Well, _a_ year ago. Roughly. I thought it would be a bad example for the kids." Oswin looked at her, shocked. "What?"

"I'm gonna tell your husband."

"What!? No, please do _not _that! He'll kill me and lecture me about ruining my teeth or something! Hang on, do the nanogenes stop my teeth staining?" she asked.

"Clara, you're not going to start smoking again! I didn't know you did in the first place! Why would you ruin yourself like that!?" Oswin demanded, like she'd gravely offended her.

"Erm... I was in uni, everyone smoked. My dad smokes too," she said.

"Does he? Does he really? That's no excuse! Do you need me to show you what happens when you smoke too much?"

"I only did for seven years! And then I quit, I told you, because of the Maitlands," she said. Oswin looked even more shocked.

"_Seven years!?_ You started smoking when you were _twenty three_?"

"I - what!? I'm... You think I'm THIRTY!? Don't speak to me. Unless you're explaining where we are." They watched each other in stand-off for a minute, and then Oswin walked off, and Clara followed. "Where are you going?" she rooted through her pockets for an umbrella, but there was none, so she just hunched her shoulders and crossed her arms tightly around her.

"Over here. Must be a park or something..." she muttered, "Anywhere with a bench."

"Why?" Clara asked, pausing a moment to pick up a soggy newspaper from the floor, trying to read the date. "Always winter..."

"Maybe it's just... Why are you standing there? I walked off briskly, that means follow," Oswin said. She'd walked a further ten feet before noticing Clara was not behind her.

"I thought a paper might be helpful," said Clara. "December 2nd, 1926. That'll be why it's a bit chilly."

"I think we're in New York," Oswin said, comtinuing to walk from where she'd been. Clara dropped the paper where she'd found it and skittered off after her sister.

"Why? Do you see the Empire State?" Clara stared around into the night gloom for any skyscrapers.

"No, it hasn't been built yet," said Oswin, "Statue of Liberty is over there though." She pointed over the dark green sea, sprinkled with rain ripples, to the statue Clara had once only seen on postcards. The Doctor had taken her to New York before though, so she wasn't too amazed.

"That doesn't help us at all though," said Clara.

"Maybe we should go see it?" Oswin suggested.

"No. We're not going to see the statue. It's the middle of the night, and we have to find the echo."

"Who is..?"

"I have no clue, I don't remember many," said Clara.

"Maybe your echo _is_ the Statue of Liberty."

"That's stupid, it's... It's not funny," said Clara, "You're stupid, and we have nothing to do. Except smoke."

"No Clara. It's bad for you. I'll switch off your cloud. And the Doctor disapproves."

"He disapproves of apples, I don't really value his opinion. Although he also disapproves of you..."

"Smoke all you like," she changed her tune. "Except don't, because I'm kidding," she said.

"Fine. You win. For now. But if we end up in a speakeasy, I am not gonna be the odd one out who cares about, you know, _health issues_. And for the record, his last wife murdered him and countless others, but god forbid I set some plants on fire."

"I think you're an idiot. Don't you see those gross adverts on television trying to desuade you? With the children dying in the car?"

"I don't have children! Or a car! Well I do have a car, but it's currently in London because I live on a spaceship. And anyway, these are imaginary Camel Lights, in my head. They're harmless," said Clara, "and you were just joking about it five minutes ago."

"Yes, joking, but you're taking it way too far!"

"'Way too far'? Come on, there's nothing to do. You want to tour New York City at..." she found a watch was on her wrist and squinted at the damp surface, making the numerals wiggle, "one-thirty? We can go to New York when we get back. Real New York."

"For what - sisterly bonding time?" Oswin appeared to be at least half-serious.

"No... On your own... _Or_ with Creepy Adam," said Clara.

"Or your husband."

"Ha, no, the Doctor is supremely unfond of New York. After he lost the Ponds. And then he lost me in the replica," Clara said, "he won't go with you, and neither will I. Your boyfriend probably will, if you ask him."

"Oh, yeah, except _he's not my boyfriend_. So will you drop it?" Clara didn't say anything for a few moments, just stared around at where they'd ended up standing. They'd rounded a corner into a small wasteland, with a collection of old warehouses to one side, before a road cralwed up out of the dirt and snaked away towards the city's lights. They were on the edge of Manhatten, looking out over the sea to the distant statue, before the green came through the cracks.

"...Do you hear that?" Clara asked quietly, when a musical sound pricked at her ears and she turned in the direction of one of the warehouses.

"Hear what?"

"That music..." Clara said. She turned and slowly followed the sounds of distant jazz, ignoring her sister's quips about someone she once knew who followed music and died. "That's sirens," she corrected, "which don't exist."

"Since when was Clara Oswald the definitive voice on what does and doesn't exist? Since she ran away with an alien in a blue box and died a thousand times just so she could get some?"

"Shut up, I did not 'want some', and there is definitely music."

"Fascinating. Clara's found a speakeasy. Not like there were over thirty-thousand of them or something," said Oswin, "or maybe it's just an underground jazz club. Nothing better to start a riot that a saxophone."

"Will you be quiet?" she snapped, "You're too sarcastic."

"I'm not sarcastic, I'm logical, it's different. And no I-"

"You have got to be the world's worst time traveller. If you'd travelled with him-"

"I'd be married."

"You would not be married to _my_ husband. You would have been so cautious and annoying he'd have got rid of you. Or gone to find me. Now shut up." She finally listened and silenced as they reached the warehouse. Clara pressed her ear to the metal wall, but couldn't hear any more. So it was coming from underground - but how did they get underground? "Get your screens out."

"That's a bit forward, shouldn't you buy me dinner first?"

"Oh my stars, _shut. Up_," said Clara. "Go find out how I get inside!"

"I just told you, buy me dinner first before you get inside."

"I will hit you!"

"You're not helping yourself."

"Go away, I hate you, I hope you die. Again. But worse this time."

"Has anyone ever told you you're a terrible sister?"

"Has anyone ever told you incest is disgusting and illegal?"

"Has anyone ever told you smoking is disgusting and illegal?" Clara stopped and glared at her.

"Stop bringing it up! I've been living on the TARDIS for a month and a half without any cravings. And it's not illegal."

"Hang on, when did you quit?"

"STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. It's just a thing! You keep bringing it up! Be quiet, and don't tell the Doctor," she snapped, "I'm sick of discussing it."

"So if you-"

"_No, shut up_!" she shouted, not caring what Oswin was going to say about her old, long gone habits. She walked off and ran her hand along the wall of the warehouse, feeling for gaps that would indicate a door and watching the ground for traps, until Oswin hooked her elbow and pulled her away.

"The door is this way." In the end, she did trust her sister not to throw her in the sea or anything equally radical. Well, apparently she cared about her or something. Eventually, they ended up on the other side of the warehouse next to a door sticking out of the ground that lead to basement storage. It was hidden from the roadside by some tactfully places bits of junk and old lorry wagons discarded and then placed on the docks. Clara sonicked the door.

"There's a penis joke about your husband here somewhere..." she mused, until Clara got sick and thwacked her on the head with it and it shocked her, "Oh wow, your husband's screwdriver is electrifying me."

"Shut up or my bedroom will no longer be a place you're allowed to come when you get scared of your boyfriend."

"I can't help if I come in your bedroom, not when you're there. _Sister_."

"Please god, how do I make it stop?" she said to the air, opening the hatch in front of them both. Whether it had been locked before she'd 'unlocked' it, she couldn't be sure.

"Just say the safe-word."

"One day Oswin, you'll get arrested for this perversion of yours. Don't make a handcuffs joke there."

"Who said I was joking about the handcuffs?" That was it, Clara thought to herself, hoping her sister wasn't listening in, from now on, everytime she makes a joke about incest, I'm gonna smoke.

So before they went down the stairs where the music was floating from, she got a cigarette out of her pocket while her sister was distracted. Oswin didn't look around until she heard Clara strike the match.

"OH MY CHRIST HAVE YOU LISTENED TO_NOTHING_ HAVE BEEN TELLING YOU!?" she cried out, stepping back from Clara, who just glared and then blew smoke at her.

"Are we going in then?" she waved her fag-hand to the door. Oswin glowered, her mood dropping completely when she saw Clara was serious about reigniting her old cigarette habit.

"After you," she said darkly, glaring at the Paper Roll of Death she was holding. Clara shrugged off her 'sibling's' mood and went down the stairs.

They went down the stairs and through a range of snicket-like, thin corridors with hardly any lighting at all, which made Clara wish she had a torch among her various possessions. But she thought walking into an illegal nightclub with a torch would probably make her look like a detective, and was not wise.

And then a gorillia-like man must have heard their footsteps, because a door just around a sharp corner opened, letting the sounds of laughter and glass-chinking trickle through. And then it shut, and he stuck his oblong head around the corner, towering over the both of them. '_We must have taken a wrong turn and ended up in the zoo._' 'You're a zoo.' '_Oh yeah? Well at least I'm not married.'_

"You here to see the Fox?" he said in a Brooklyn accent, looking them up and down and lingering longer than Clara would normallly stand for.

"Sure," she said, deciding that putting on an American accent would just be embarrassing. She guessed the Fox was her echo in this life. Maybe she was a rich mobster. He grunted, and walked off. Clara followed at a distance, ignoring her sister's frequent, disapproving looks whenever she took a drag. "Stop being a baby."

"Sorry if I don't want to end up in an early grave," she hissed back as they walked through the smoke-filled air. Clara was used to it, but she could see Oswin struggling to breathe and not cough.

"How's that working out for you?"

"That's not funny."

"It's _hilarious_ to me," said Clara, smirking like she did whenever she ended up hitting a nerve in her sister. And then they were lead to a booth in a corner, expecting to see another identical twin, but instead they saw-

"_Amelia Pond!?_" exclaimed Oswin loudly. The piano in the corner faltered and silence fell over the mumbles and quiet, tipsy laughs of the customers. Indeed it was Amy Pond, sitting in a booth with a brutish bodyguard on either side, and a guy with whom her relationship was definitely not platonic, but whose name wasn't Rory Williams. Amy cleared her throat and waved a hand, and the noise started up again.

"It's fine," she said, "Let them sit down." A bodyguard appeared behind the Oswalds, leaving them no choice but to shuffle in opposite as Amy's gentleman friend slid out to stand by. "Am I really drunk, or are there really two of you?" she squinted, still Scottish. A female, Scottish mob boss in the 1920s. Could it get any weirder? Nevertheless, Clara kept her quips to herself as she suspected most everyone in the room had a gun. _She_ might even have a gun and not know it. '_No, you're just pleased to see me._' And then Clara took and extra long puff on the cigarette and blew it out of the side of her mouth, right into Oswin's face. She choked and waved her hand around.

"Excuse my sister," Clara apologised, "She's squiffy, as you can see." Amy frowned, and then seemed to smile. Clara didn't smile back, but maintained the demeanour that she was better than everyone else in the room. Which was how you were supposed to act in such social situations.

"Can I get you a drink?" asked Amy, waving down the guy she'd been all over not ten seconds ago.

"Always," said Clara, cheering up a little at mention of alcohol. '_How about no?_' 'How about I have my nice, trustworthy sister here to stop me drinking too much?' '_Hmm... How. About. No?_' "Coca Cola."

"Please, this is Mos Eisley," said Amy, "We get only the best Canadian imports." '_Mos Eisley? Really? Your inner-Jedi can't even stay quiet in dreams?_' 'Shush, they might play the Cantina song.'

"Still. The same," said Clara.

"Joe!" she said to the bloke, and then she got taken aback when she saw he was standing right there. She leant away and said, "why are you so close?"

"Sorry..." he apologised, quickly stepping back. She nodded in approval and turned back to Clara.

"Joe will get your drinks, won't you?" she said to him. He nodded and darted away. Clara wondered if his name even _was_ Joe, Amy didn't seem particularly sober. "So. Which one of you is the Swallow?"

"Neither," said Clara, "we're her sisters. We're over from across the _pond_, looking. Our parents have died, you see. There's a tiny bit of inheritence."

"Gutsy, I like that. Coming in here and lying," and then she put a gun on the table in front of them, and promptly all of the body guards drew weapons too. "You're not the Swallow - neither of you."

"I just said that, I said we were her sisters," said Clara, trying her best to be unfazed by the ten guns pointed at their heads.

"The Swallow is not from England, she's from Delaware," said Amy.

"You believe her?" Clara questioned. Amy narrowed her eyes, "We were separated at birth."

"Typical story."

"We're identical! How can you dispute it!?" Oswin demanded, one of the first things she'd said, though she was trying to ignore Clara's presence as best she could, though it lessened when Clara stubbed out her cigaratte in the ashtray in the middle of the table.

"I suppose..." said Amy, "how'd you know to come here?"

"I... Have... Contacts..." Clara blatantly lied, and before she looked too suspicious, she got another Camel out of her pocket and held it pver the electric lighter nearby. Oswin kicked her when she did. '_You're chaining!_' 'I'm also dreaming. And if I were you, I would light up. Just to be safe.' '_Why will lighting a fag make me safe?_' 'Because you look weird. You have to blend in when you travel in time.' Oswin just crossed her arms and shuffled away.

"How much inheritence?" Amy asked.

"That's none of your business," said Clara, looking down her nose and trying to look like a snooty, upperclass Brit on a 'holiday' to the States.

"She works for my business, and I make my employees' business my business," said Amy, lowering her gun. Everyone else lowered their own guns at the same time she did.

"Employee how?" Oswin asked, "Records just say she was unemployed."

"Was?" asked Amy.

"Is," Clara jumped in, "she means is. Why? Are you worried about her?"

"Normally I'd get Jack to waste you both," said Amy, motioning to the server who had just brought over their drinks, whom she'd called Joe just a few minutes ago. "But I need what she's selling, so I need decoys."

"Decoys for what? What's she selling?" asked Clara. '_Sex, probably._' 'Not all of my echoes are prostitutes.'

"She smuggles for me," said Amy, "Hides the alcohol in the cigarettes, makes it look like she's bringing Marlboros into the country. It actually works quite well."

"So?" '_Oh, this one smokes too?_' Oswin interrupted Clara with her thoughts. 'She might not. She probably does though.'

"So she's late, none of _my_ contacts have seen the stash car anywhere," said Amy.

"And..?" Clara asked.

"Well she has debts, wouldn't shock me to know she's nicked all the hooch for herself. But it's a dangerous route, and I can't afford to not know what's happened," Amy told them.

"So send someone to find out," Clara said. '_Shut up, Clara._'

"I plan on it," she said.

"Good," said Clara.

"Yep." There was a long silence. Oswin put her head in her hands in frustration at something, and Amy started to smirk.

"...Who?" Clara asked into the quiet.

"You two."

"I told you to shut up," hissed Oswin. 'Oops...'

"You're gonna drive up to the border, follow the route down, and see if you can find out what's happened," said Amy, "and when you do, you're going to call me and tell me."

"What's to stop us just leaving?" Clara (stupidly) asked. Amy and everyone else pulled out guns again. '_You're so stupid._' 'YOU'RE stupid.'

"This inheritence of yours," said Amy, "hand it over or I'll shoot you. You do the job, you can have it back. The contraband is worth more anyway."

"What makes you think we're just carrying that sort of money?" Oswin asked.

"Oh, a lot is it?"

"I... Crap..."

"You have to have it on you, you can't possibly have any accounts here," said Amy.

"Maybe we stashed it." 'We have unlimited cash, what are you doing?'

"Then Jim will escort you to go get it," she pointed at the same server she'd called Joe and Jack already.

"We do have it," said Clara taking control.

"Good. How much is it?"

"About $1000, each," said Oswin.

"So you have three thousand on you?"

"No, one. Our shares are at home," said Clara. "You can have our sister's share though." Clara reached into her pocket and dug out fistfuls of bills, really hoping whatever she found added up to a grand. She dug until her pocket was empty, and then pushed the green towards Amy, who took about five minutes counting.

"Eleven-hundred," said Amy, and then she took one of the many notes and gave them it back. Clara squinted at it. '_That would be a fifty._' 'I knew that.' "In case you need to buy gas."

* * *

And that was the story of how currently Clara and Oswin were stuck in a truck driving north towards Canada in the middle of winter. It was a good thing Oswin's hologram capabilities made her a walking sat-nav, Clara thought. But Clara had to drive, and she had to drive in the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road.

"Stupid Americans..." she muttered when a turn-off confused her again. The road was narrow and surrounded by dead woodland trees and a few evergreens. It was the middle of the night and there were still at least six hours until daylight crept up. And it had also since started to snow, and it was getting heavier and obscuring Clara's view outside by the second.

"Bit xenophobic," commented her sister. She just cursed again and waved her hand outside, blowing all the snow off the window.

"It's freezing. Can't you do anything about that? The heat doesn't work. Does this car even have heat? Was fire invented in 1926?"

"That's the stupidest thing you've ever said."

"Well? Can't you make it hot in here?"

"It's hot enough, I'm here," she said, and then Clara slammed on the breaks and Oswin jerked forwards. "_Ow_!" Clara fished through her pockets for a cigarette and a match. And then she found gloves, a hat and a scarf in her magical coat, too.

"I'm gonna get one of these coats," she said. Oswin glared at the paper roll between her fingers, but Clara ignored this and restarted the truck, which stalled a few times, but eventually started up, "Transdimensional pockets. Psychic paper. Maybe I'll even get my own screwdriver."

"So you can screw yourself when your husband's not around - great thinking," said Oswin sarcastically. Clara made a mental note that that remark warranted another cigarette later.

"Are you telling me that you can't make this car heat up?"

"Car heaters aren't invented for another seven years," said Oswin, "And no, I can't just invent one. Not with no materials."

"Well what about an air conditioner I can sonic?"

"That won't be invented for thirteen years."

"What if we stop at... I don't know, a garage? A mechanics?"

"FINE, WE'LL MAKE A DETOUR ON OUR_TWELVE HOUR DRIVE_."

"I have to spend twelve hours in a car with_you_!? You better take a shift driving this damn thing, download it into your head or something! Why can't you drive the whole way!?_You're _the hologram!"

"You offered. And I'm not a hologram here, actually," said Oswin darkly, brining up a map on the floating screen in front of her and rerouting. "I'll drive if you want."

"Don't offer to drive, you'll drive if I tell you to," said Clara.

"Okay I won't drive."

"I didn't say that! As soon as we get a heater, you're taking the wheel. How long will it take to invent one?"

"I don't know! Just wait and see, stop being so impatient," snapped Oswin, "it's not even that cold."

"It's snowing."

"Yeah, it's about 1°, not even zero."

"Well I'm sorry for still being alive and feeling the cold, even if you can't. Your human boyfriend would ask for a heater too you know, and you'd be like, 'Oh Creepy Adam, I love you _sooo_ much of _course_ you can have a heater'," and then she made immature kissing noises. Oswin pulled her legs up and hugged them, pouting out of the other window. Clara glanced over while she was driving. She didn't say anything. And now Clara felt guilty. But she was also starving again, and getting tired already. Although the nicotine was keeping the fatigue at bay.

"I'm sorry, okay?" Clara said fifteen quiet minutes later, watching the snow fall out side and creating a telekinetic shield to protect the car. "I'm also hungry."

"There's still half an hour until we get to a town," said Oswin flatly.

"I said I was sorry."

"You're forgetting I can read your stupid emotions and I know when you're being sincere or not," she snapped.

"You've been making jokes about me all day, so I'm sorry if I'm not very considerate right now, _Winny_."

"That is NOT a term of endearment, Clara!"

"IT'S NOT SUPPOSE TO BE!" She stopped the car.

"Why did you stop the car? You're the one who started it!"

"I DID NOT!"

"What is even wrong with you!? Is this something to do with your stupid fags!?" Clara then crossed her arms and sat back, staring out of the window and letting snow accumulate over the front.

"You've been making stupid incest jokes all day, you keep judging me for doing something that can't even hurt me at all, you keep snapping at all my echoes for two days, you keep calling me stupid, and now we're stuck in a freezing car and I'm starving and cold and tired, and this cigarette right now is the only source of warmth I have so let me smoke in peace without you complaining!" Clara shouted, getting a huge lungful of the narcotic and letting it numb her brain as she sat back and looked out of the window.

There were a long few silent minutes of frost crunching under the car as it settled and thin tree boughs creaking under the weight of it, and wind whistled through the gaps in the doors and the windows and made the flakes on the ground roll away, as Clara desperately tried to forget she even had a sister and that she wasn't alone in the rickery truck.

She didn't look round until she heard Oswin strike a match, and saw her holding one of her own cigarettes.

"You're holding it the wrong way," Clara told her blandly. Oswin turned it around and then lit it, and coughed as soon as she tried to smoke it. "What are you doing? You don't smoke. Are you trying to impress me?"

"I'm a hologram, they can't hurt me -" she coughed again "-either. And you said they were warm. And that I should blend in."

"They're not that warm," said Clara. Oswin coughed again. "You don't have to smoke you know," she tried not to laugh as Oswin kept coughing. "It's a bad habit, and it will make your teeth and nails go yellow."

"My... Favourite... Colour..."

"You are going to choke to death," said Clara, "Give me the cigarette."

"What? No."

"I'll tell Creepy Adam you smoke," Clara taunted, holding out her hand. She'd just swipe the cig away telekinetically eventually.

"Why do I care what he thinks about me? Doesn't he already think I'm a crazy with a goat-phobia?"

"That's because you _told_ him you had a goat-phobia."

"And?"

"He still fancies you, I don't know why you're complaining," said Clara, and then she opened the door and was immedietely hit by a wall of cold, and a gust of wind blew out her cigarette. "That's unfortunate," she commented on it, getting out and landing in the thickening snow.

"Where are you going?" Oswin called after her.

"I'm guessing," Clara said, going over to the back of the uncovered truck they had been 'given' (she wouldn't be surprised if it was stolen, but transporting alcohol around during prohibition in a stolen car was probably not the best idea). There were a few crates in the back that had been rattling around as Clara had driven over land.

'_Should I get out?_' 'No,' thought Clara, waving her hand to close the door behind her she'd left open. '_What are you doing?_' Oswin said, watching Clara climb into the back of the truck in the rearview mirror and start kicking the crates.

The first one she kicked was empty and made a clanging sound in the deserted part of forest they were in. But the second one she kicked was heavy, so she brushed the snow off it and got a crowbar off the side and pried it open. She floated the loose-lidded box up, making it follow behind her as she opened the door again and put it down on the seat.

"Okay, what's that?" Oswin asked.

"Hopefully..." said Clara.

"What? You stopped mid-sentence. What is it? Why aren't you explaining?"

"Well that's what you sound like whenever you do your genius-thing," said Clara, opening the crate to reveal a circular, white object with vents on the side. "This would be a fancy, futuristic, kinetic space heater."

"Kinetic, obviously," said Oswin dryly. "Means someone has to turn it." Clara pulled out the wind-up handle on the device and held her hand next to it, and a moment later it had started wildly spinning 'on its own'. And then she was hit by a wave of warm air, and Oswin lifted it up so Clara could throw the empty crate into the back of the truck again.

"Now we can be warm," said Clara, taking the space heater and putting it on the dashboard in front of them both.

"Right. How did you do that?" Oswin asked.

"Well, we're dreaming," said Clara, "so I just lucid dreamt. I guess." And then she lit another cigarette, and restarted the car.

* * *

The space heater ended up falling from the dashboard so often Clara gave up and made it hover in the air between them. The car was not particularly insulated, so if they switched off the heater all the cold air would take its place in a matter of minutes. But nearly forty minutes later, just after three o'clock in the morning, they found themselves in a small town on the edge of a highway, featuring a motel and an all-night diner.

They took two window seats, and Oswin ordered everything on the menu. So Clara decided not to order anything except a milkshake (yes, as a sick joke to her sister, who glared at the concoction with a vengeanance) and steal her food when it arrived.

"Just because you can taste here doesn't mean you have to eat everything," said Clara. Oswin shrugged while they waited, and she sighed. "Are we gonna keep driving or are we gonna sleep? There's a motel."

"What if your echo's in trouble?" Oswin asked, "we _are_ here to help her."

"You care about your sisters now?" Oswin glared at her for that callous remark.

"Who said I didn't?"

"You sort of implied," said Clara.

"...Well alright, I don't care about them. But you care about them, and I care about you - no, shut up, I do - so therefore I care about them," she said, cutting over Clara when she was about to interrupt and bring up the whole permanently-disfiguring her thing. And then she sat back looking proud of herself.

"Stop saying that, it's weird," said Clara. "_Care_..."

"Well how do I not?"

"Mostly because the first time we met you tried to convince me I was in love with the Doctor-"

"Hang on I..? What? When was this? When I first met you, you were getting _married_ to him," she said.

"Yes, and remember you spent the whole time lying about how you slept with Jack?"

"Well-"

"And then what did you... Oh _that's _right, slashed my face open. _Four times_."

"It wasn't really four times, it was-"

"Then you pulled that stunt at the Maitlands and tried to convince _my_ dad I was a lesbian. Then you pretended to date the Tenth Doctor, just to annoy me, and also you really upset Rose doing that-"

"_Me_? _You're_ the one who basically ruined her marriage, are-"

"You told the Doctor I was pregnant and took advantage of me in my weak and feeble state-"

"Now you're just making it sound sinister."

"You kept asking the Doctor inapporpriate sex questions, you've woken me up in the middle of the night about a million times, you tried to poison me with truth pancakes or something, you've made inappropriate phonecalls to my dad multiple times, you've tried to sleep with my husband multiple times, and you threw a rounders ball _in my eye_!"

"Apart from-"

"A ROUNDERS BALL."

"Apart-"

"_IN MY EYE_."

"YES, but _apart_ from that!" Oswin protested. "And what do you mean I tried to convince you you were in love with him? Weren't you?"

"I was in denial about my emotions," said Clara defensively, "And you won't remember it, it was in my head."

"So it was a dream. You're blaming me for something I did in a dream?"

"Well this is a dream."

"This is different, we're both here. I was obviously just in your - _oh my stars you have wet dreams about me_!"

"What!? I - No, _no,_ that is _not_ what I was saying at _all_," said Clara. "But this is what I'm talking about with the stupid incest jokes!" she said, getting out a cigarette. She obviously knew the dangers of smoking indoors, but in a made-up world in her head, in Ametica, in the 20s, there weren't any laws against it. "So remind me again when _exactly_ you've shown you 'care' about me?"

"Okay, you want a list?"

"Erm, yeah, a list would be quite handy."

"Well, I helped pick out a lot of the stuff for your wedding. Like your dress, your rings, all the other dresses. And then do you remember when I risked my consciousness remnants being destroyed to get mind patch so I could save you? Do you remember when you got really ill and for like three days I was the only one who would stay and look after you? I held your hair when you were sick! You were sick_on me_! Do you remember when I told you how to let everyone know you weren't dead? Do you remember that _I _was the one who rescued you from Clint? Do you remember when Rose teleported the pair of you to the past last week _I_ was the one who came looking for you both? Do you remember that when you were completely shitfaced the other day it was me and your husband who took you back to your tent? Do you remember when you forgot you were married and I let you stay in my room, and then pulled that awful itching-powder prank to get revenge _on your behalf_? Do you remember _yesterday_ when I saved you from _Jack the Ripper_? Any of this? Did any of it stick with you? How about when I left and got you those nanogenes so that now you can stay with the Doctor forever? How about when I figured out how to give you the superpowers you've been dreaming off since you were a child?"

"I-"

"Oh wait, here's the best one, do you remember when you died in that explosion? Something you won't know is that I'm the one who teleported you to the medibay so quickly. And during that time, I went out with him to buy your favourite engagement ring from where I searched your brain to find out what it was," said Oswin, "so do not say I don't care. Do not contradict me on that, Clara Oswald, because you do not know the half of it." She said. Clara just stared at her, and then shifted her gaze into the distance instead.

"You do care, don't you?" Clara said, rather dumbfounded, remembering Oswin's reaction to when Clara's nose had been bleeding before, and to when she'd found out Clara smoked. It was almost scared. How she always bothered herself with Clara's problems that usually weren't even problems, instead of bringing up her own issues. How she practically moved in with Clara and the Doctor just to look after the former when she had flu.

"I told you yesterday, without you there would be no me. And I might sometimes blame you for me dying at twenty-five years old, but it's twenty-five years more than I would have had without you," she said. "It's just not in my genes to hate you."

"Wow, thanks, and I thought you were a nice person for a moment that," joked Clara. Oswin smiled bitterly and continued to stare out of the window, and finally, now their bickering had quelled, food arrived. A lot of food.

And then it was silent and not a lot happened until Oswin suddenly stopped eating like a ravenous pig and made a gaspy-choky noise and stared out of the window behind Clara, who had the sudden urge to not look behind her, since they were in the back booth and the window was directly behind her:

"What is it?" she asked urgently. Oswin nodded. "I'm not gonna look... No... No I won't look..."

"Seriously, look," Oswin whispered, nodding behind Clara again. And then her gaze followed around the corner of the diner they were in and Clara saw a ragged blur shoot past, and into the restaurant, burst her echo in that life, and then she took one look at the pair of them and collapsed. There was a pause, and then Oswin and Clara both got up at the same time and apologised profusely, and Oswin made clear she would return as soon as possible for the rest of her food.

And then they were back in the cold night air again, dragging the echo over the the motel.

"You take her," Clara said, hauling her to Oswin, "and book the room while I go get a car."

"Room? Not rooms?"

"Just make sure there's two beds, or something along those lines," snapped Clara.

"No, _you_ take her in the car with you! You can half float her anyway," Oswin told her sternly.

"Okay! Fine! I'll go get the car..." she grumbled, carting her echo through the snow and leaving drag marks in the snow that was still falling in the American winter. She pushed her echo into her seat in an undignified fashion, and shut the door quickly so she wouldn't fall out, and then she steered the truck out and blasted the road clear of snow as she went towards the motel. It was right next door, but in the awful weather it took nearly five minutes for Clara to manoeuvre, and then Oswin was glaring out from under and awning with a set of keys.

Clara parked and locked the Probably-Stolen Truck, after opening the passenger door on the right and letting the 1920s echo fall out, and almost into the snow. Except a telekinetic forcefield prevented this. And then she grabbed the space heater and threw it straight to Oswin, who jumped but caught it.

"What if I'd dropped that!?" she protested.

"Then I would have caught it," said Clara, shrugging. It was true, she would have, and then she carried on pulling the unconscious echo with her into a room, with one bed.

"I asked for a sofa, honestly," said Oswin, "I don't think they knew what one was."

"Why didn't you say couch!?"

"I did! And also settee, so, there. Do you want me to play back my memories, or are you gonna trust me? For once?" she challenged. Clara couldn't be bothered with an argument, so she threw her echo down into the chair in the corner of the room, flicked on the light, and Oswin put the space heater on the floor.

"Why are you putting it on the floor?"

"...Hot air rises..? Did you not know that?"

"Um..."

"It's basic science, Clara! Or basic geography. How do you think hot air ballons fly? Or airships?"

"I'm sorry for not being qualified in engineering," Clara said. Oswin shook her head, and then declared she was going to retrieve her food from the diner, and left, just as Clara lit another cigarette and dug around the cupboards for an ashtray. 'Ask as reception for another set of bedding.' '_Why?_' 'Just do!' '_Say please_.' 'Please?' '_Okay._'

Clara didn't do an awful lot for the ten minutes Oswin was gone, and then she returned with an armful of blankets, and swore because they wouldn't let her take any food, so she had to order more. So she returned with coffees and burgers.

"So what do we do now?" Oswin asked, after Clara had thrown blankets over her echo.

"Dunno," said Clara, eating a fry. "But it seems pretty fishy if you ask me. If only she got out of... Well I guess there must have been a crash of some sort. Aren't you a doctor?"

"Who? Me?" asked Oswin. Clara nodded, "Erm, no. I mean I've read basics-"

"And in genius terms, 'basics' is..?"

"I could pass all the theory exams in your time, but none of the practicals. Why? Do you want me to see if she has any injuries? You know I'm solely a computer genius."

"Oh, woe betide... And I know you're hyperintelligent."

"I'm not a doctor."

"Well now you have eternity to learn all these new skills."

"Mmm. And so do you," said Oswin. "...Let's go look then," she stood up and put her coat back on, putting on her own gloves and scarf too, which were identical to Clara's, except Clara's clothes were mostly black and other dark colours, and everything her sister had been wearing that day and the day before was bright red.

"Not exactly discreet, are you?" she said, putting out her cigarette and holding the door open for Oswin, letting in the breeze.

Over the last hour, the weather had been getting worse and worse and worse. Ever since the snow had started, and now it was verging on a full-out snowstorm. They walked around the back of the diner to avoid the view of the window-watchers, and then Oswin found haggard tracks in the snow in danger of being covered over.

"This weather is appalling," said Clara, following her sister following the tracks. Clara eventually gave up trying to see and phased through instead, so she didn't leave anything behind in the snow.

"Yep, well. Don't mess up these tracks with your ape-feet," said Oswin.

"_Ape-feet_? Do we have different shoe sizes?" Clara asked, bewildered at this insult.

"I don't know!" Oswin said, turning around. "Oh here we go again with the magic tricks," she snapped, and then she fell over into the snow, almost completely obscured.

"Nice and warm down there, is it?" asked Clara, stepping forward. Oswin said nothing, and Clara held out her hand for her to take, which she did while grumbling.

"Thanks. Why aren't you letting go?" she asked when Clara carted them both away to follow the tracks that hadn't been sabotaged by clumsy genii.

"I'm phasing you. Do you not want to be phased?" Clara asked back, pulling her sister through the snow.

"I... fine. If only we were invisible too," she muttered.

"Yeah, but beggars can't be choosers," said Clara.

"Which, in your case, means..?"

"It _means_ that I can't be picky about what superpowers I get, because I'm still getting two. Which is more than most," she said as they cut through the trees and eventually reached a dirt road.

"Hang on," Oswin stopped suddenly and brought up her screens, leaving Clara walking, "Car crashes... Car crashes..." she muttered to herself, presumably doing cross references upon cross references. "Damn, it's either off-the-record or there hasn't been a crash."

"Okay, but she's been running away from something, so there must be signs of a stuggle?" Clara said. "Maybe they got ran off the road, or the police got to them?"

"No, the Swallow has burns," said Oswin, "actually, hang on... I need two hands... Bloody snow..." she brought up multiple screens and memories and did some calculations in the air, and eventually Clara gave up and kept walking off, leaving her sister under a telekinetic field the snow rolled off of, and then she got out her torch and shone it until it reflected off something near a tree and she walked over, keeping an eye out over her shoulder for ambushers, but she was making no sound, so they wouldn't hear hear.

What she found half-buried in the snow was a torn packet of Marlboro cigarattes. She tried to pick it up but accidentally phased through and cursed, but on her second attempt she lifted it and examined it. It was torn halfway down, and so were its contents, but she noticed there were enough shredded bits of cigarette to make a full pack. So it couldn't have belonged to anyone who avidly smoked, because they wouldn't throw out the packet. And if they'd been attacked there would be signs of a struggle. She remembered Amy telling them the alcohol stash was hidden amongst Marlboros, and thought maybe it was a clue to the whereabouts of the contraband.

Clara shone her torch around the vicinity carefully, looking for anything else to pick up on, but there was just the single, slightly blackened and singed pack of cigs. So she headed back a way.

"Clara!" Oswin bumped straight into her out of nowhere when she wasn't looking. Well, she bumped straight _through_ her. "It's this way," she pointed, going down the road and looking over her shoulder to beckon her sister.

Clara followed after her, holding her torch aloft.

"How do you know?" she asked, watching her breath in front of her.

"Because of maths, and how old the burns were and calculating a radius. Look, it's over here," she said.

'Shh,' Clara thought, turning off her torch. Oswin turned around and frowned in the moonlight, 'I found these cigarettes,' she held up the pack, 'It's full and burnt. Amy said they hid the alcohol in a truck of fags. Marlboros, to be exact. Remember?' Oswin took the packet from her and examined it. '_Well where'd you find it?_' 'This way,' she took Oswin's hand and phased them through the snow again, leaving no footprints and letting no-one see or hear them, and then pointing her to the hole in the snow, and Clara stood by boredly while Oswin calculated trajectory or something. '_This way._'

The wreckage was still burning when they arrived, the precious, flammable cargo doing very little the quell the blaze. The smoke was difficult to see as it curled through the snow, and the ashes did nothing but blend into the scenery.

"What's the smell..?" Clara asked, stepping back. She looked to Oswin for the answer she usually held, but she didn't seem to be paying attention. It was neither the tobacco nor the alcohol fumes, it was a rank stench and something new entirely. But it was far to pungent to conjure up from her imagination.

"...Doesn't matter, Clara... Just... Don't... Don't worry about it... Okay?" said Oswin.

"I've never smelt anything like it before."

"Good... That's good... I'd worry if you had," she said, walking around and surveying the area. "One set of tracks..." mumbled Oswin. "Gonna have to find schematics..." she carried on talking to herself until Clara switched on her torch and went to look through the undergrowth.

She didn't have to walk for very long until she found more scattered cigarette packets and eventually glass shards. But finally she stumbled across a ball of paper, and picked it up. '_Hey, I need your help, come back over here?_' Clara stuffed the paper ball into her pocket and backtracked.

"What is it?" she said, confident the coast was now clear.

"I have to look at the engine," said Oswin, "And I don't have superstrength."

"Nobody has superstrength, what do - you want me to flip the car upright, is that it?" her tone turned flat halfway through the sentence, and Oswin nodded so she sighed. "But it's really big."

"When has that stopped you?"

"Oh, ha ha, very funny..." she muttered. "I... Fine, I'll try..."

"Do or do not, there is no try."

"Don't quote Yoda to me."

"I thought it would help motivate you..." she sounded genuinely disappointed. Clara held out her hands and concentrated on moving the car. In the end, it didn't take as much effort as she would have thought when it flipped over back onto its wheels. But the sisgustig smell got worse. And then the charred remains of a humn rolled out of the back of it and into the snow.

"Oh god..." said Clara.

"Yeah... Just... I don't know... Try not to think about it..." said Oswin, stepping closer to the truck and lifting up the hood, and then even more smoke forced its way out and made them both cough on the smell of death and fire.

"Is that the smell?" Clara asked, stepping back from the scene when her sister seemed strangely at ease, if overprotective. She shot Clara a look.

"You're thinking about it, I told you not to think about it," she said darkly.

"Oswin. Is that the smell?"

"...Yes, okay, alright? The smell is... is the bodies... I didn't... Just forget this smell, okay? Get it out of your head. Stand back," said Oswin.

"But it's so vivid. Isn't this my dream? How could it be so real? I've never smelt it before, ever," she said shakily.

"It's my dream too, Clara," Oswin nearly shouted, but she lowered her voice at the end, "My dream too..." she repeated to herself. "You're right. You've never smelt this before, and as soon as... As soon as I recognised it... I didn't want you to. It's from my head..."

"When did you-?"

"I _don't _want to talk about it. You're lucky, Clara. You know that? Your past is stained by one-night stands and... And old smokig habits! Not death, not all this... This... Blood," she told her.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean my job was on a starship! A _starship_. Not a military rank, the future's equivalent of a... Of a bloody cruise liner! I watched the kids, Clara," she said in a hoarse voice. Clara barely knew what was happening or why her sister and snapped into this state so suddenly.

"Well... So..?" Clara asked, thinking she was probably meant to know the answer to the question already, and then Oswin turned to shout.

"SO WHERE DO YOU THINK I LEARNT TO SHOOT!? And fight!? I didn't learn this on the Alaska! I stowed away on there to get away from it!"

"From what? Titan? But when you were speaking to Adam, you-"

"I know, I know, I made it sound like a stupid utopia. It wasn... It's not. It isn't a utopia. For god's sake, Clara, haven't you ever asked your husband about Gallifrey?" she said. And then there was silence while Clara mulled it all over, and Oswin went straight back to examining the car engine. Clara had seen the Doctor's past, she'd lived on Gallifrey herself in one walk of life. The way he described it, he made it sound like perfection, like heaven, like the Time Lords were gods who could do no wrong. But then he'd run away, too. And he was still running, even though they were gone. Maybe fear was what kept him going.

"Crap..." said Oswin.

"What is it?" Clara asked. Oswin held up a small, burnt-out, cylindrical object for her to see. "Right... That would be..?"

"It's clever, that's what it is. Temperatre-activated bomb as far as I can tell. On the passenger side, so... So there were two of them, and the Swallow was driving, and it exploded out. That's why her burns were on her right, because of this. It killed him, and then caused the truck to explode, which is why he's... Um... Well you know. And she got out," said Oswin.

"Okay. Sabotage," she said, fishing the ball of paper out of her pocket. "So what's..." Oswin leaned around to read over Clara's shoulder. All it saw was: _CROWS_.

"What does that mean?" Oswin asked. Clara shrugged.

"I guess she'll know if we ask."

* * *

At six in the morning, Oswin pushed Clara over so she rolled in a circle. Clara was confused by the room being upside down when she awoke, and it caused her to fall out of the air where she'd suspended herself in a blanket cocoon to finally sleep, but in the end she'd only just scraped an hour.

"Ow. Thanks. You can't wake me up in a nice way?" she said, thankful her floating pillow had cushioned her fall, like the rest of the bedding.

"Your, err... Well she's awake," Oswin said quietly. Clara took a good few minutes to untangle herself from the sheets and re-emerge as a human.

"What the hell is goin' on?" her echo, who apparently they were dubbing the Swallow. And was also American, and apparently from Delaware.

"Do you know who I am..?" Clara asked her, "Clara Oswin Oswald? You heard the name 'the Doctor'?"

"Obviously," she said American-ly. '_Clara stop making up words. Especially ones like "American-ly"._' "I know who you are. But who's she?"

"I'm like you," said Oswin.

"Right. Why are you here?"

"We came looking for you, and Amy - the, er, Fox - made a deal with us and gave us a truck if we came and found out if you'd stolen her hooch," said Clara.

"I ain't stolen nothing from her. What deal?"

"Well we said we were your sisters from abroad come to give you $1000 inheritence," said Clara, "And she took the money off us and won't return it til we find out what happened to you."

"The Toronto Crows is what happened," said the Swallow, "Street gang at war with our supplier. Blew up the car, tried to kill us. After we crossed the border, too."

"Okay. So, we take you back to the Fox now, right?" Oswin said.

"Fox'll want ya to call her ahead," she told them. 'She did tell us to call.' "Maybe I don't wanna go back. Maybe, I stay here, you say I'm toast, ya get this money and bring it back and I can move west?"

"So you HAVE been thinking of deserting?"

"Do you know how hard it is to get out of a mob? You do one thing and you're in it for life!" she argued. 'We're here to help her, right? So, we do what she says?' '_We don't have to go back, we have unlimited money. And Amy said the contraband was worth more, but she doesn't have the contraband. She needs to make money, right?_'

"We don't need to go back, we have more money here," said Clara.

"We lie to a mob boss. Great," said Oswin sarcastically, "What could possibly go wrong?" she said. And then Clara went over to her coat and pulled out a quarter for the payphone outside in the carpark.

"Dibsnotcalling," Clara said instantly.

"I - what!? That's not fair! I... Urgh. You win. Fine. Whatever. _You. Win._" And she took the quarted from her sister and skulked out. Clara smiled fakely after her, into the early-morning gloom where it was still snowing thickly. And then Clara went about emptying her endlessly rich coat pockets out to her echo while lying about time travel and where she'd gotten it.

"You have to leave _now_," said Oswin to the Swallow, bursting back into the room, and then she grabbed the truck keys and threw them over to her. "I think the Fox's 'people' are coming to investigate. We'll tell them people stole the truck and then we'll give them a load of money, but you have to be gone without a trace."

The Swallow took of like _that_, taking a ridiculous amount of money and the now Definitely-Stolen Truck. As soon as she drove away, Oswin made a yawning sound and Clara went to remake her cocoon.

"So, do you think we'll wake up somewhere different tomorrow?" Clara asked her, her hand tightening around the sonic screwdriver she was holding as she tried to sleep.

"Yeah. Yeah, probably."

"I can't..." Clara yawned, "...Wait..."


	4. The Case Of The Scarlet Whisk

**AN: This was hell near the end.**

_The Case Of The Scarlet Whisk_

_Clara_

Clara was remarkably thankful to wake up in a comfy bed that was not, for once, a freezing winter street. And it was warm. Until she groggily opened her eyes, she was hoping she'd wake up in her bedroom on the TARDIS with a relieved, beady-eyed husband watching over her, complete with bowties and fezzes and those larks.

But no, she was in a hotel. Sunlight poured through the curtains onto the room in front of her, which looked to be of a similar style to the honeymoon suite she and the Doctor had occupied when they'd broken up for a day. Only it wasn't open plan like that suite had been, she was in a big, bright bedroom with a wardrobe and when she ventured further, an ensuite. And for once, she felt well-rested. And for the fourth time, her psyche had delivered and spawned a pack of cigarettes by her bedside, along with a lighter. Now she wouldn't have to use matches.

She decided to shower. Even if she wasn't actually dirty, going to Victorian London and then prohibition-era New York in one night made her feel filthy, so she took that liberty. It was one of the greatest showers ever though, and all the way through there was not one obnoxious peep into her thought process. Finally though, she got dressed in what were welcome, ordinary Earth clothes, and ventured out into the next room.

The room stemmed out from the middle and split into the separate areas, a kitchen to Clara's North, raised on a level and surrounded by snaking cabinets, leaving just a small gap for people to transgress across down into the living room itself, which was large with a sofa-bed plonked in the middle watching the enormous television, or television-like device depending on the time period. Three of the four walls were bare and white-washed, except for the Eastern wall, made entirely of sandwiched, floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of a bulging city, spilling out into boats and docklands in the distant, distant sea. And there on the stretched-out sofa-bed was Clara's sister, sleeping peacefully.

_Don't wake the genius, don't wake the genius_, Clara thought in her head as she tiptoed around the room. Being as Oswin didn't sleep normally, since she was a hologram incapable of fatigue, Clara had no clue if she was a light or heavy sleeper. But she thought it best to be on the safe side as she explored.

The first thing she did was find the kettle, and then the second thing she did was go over to the coffee table as the kettle boiled and pick up the items there. Two of them were identical room keycards, and there was also a leaflet advertising the hotel, and finally two envelopes; one addressed to a Mrs Oswald and one to a Miss Oswald. Clara messily ripped hers open and a few things dropped out. A thick piece of fancy-looking card and a laminated bit of paper hanging from a lanyard, reading, _ACCESS ALL AREAS_.

"_You are cordially invited to attend an audience-viewed episode of 'Join Me And Dine', to take place on Tuesday, June 11th, 2763_," she read aloud to herself. 'Join Me And Dine'? Was that the future's version of Come Dine With Me, she wondered? Weird... And then she poured two cups of tea, and also a jug of cool water.

She held up her hand and levitated her sleeping sister into the air a way, over the floor rather than the bed, and then floated the jug of water over her head, and then she poured it, and Oswin shrieked, and shrieked again, and fell out of the air onto the floor.

"What the HELL was that, Clary!?" she shouted, crawling to her feet and marching up to Clara.

"I guess we're even," she said, "For, y'know. Disfiguring me. Multiple times. And all. _Even_."

"I... Fine," she said, waving her arms and getting so frustrated she was pacing. "Even. Where are we?"

"A hotel. With a very comfy bed through there. But it's such a shame you got stuck out here," Clara bragged, vividly remembering the many inches of memory foam she'd leisurely woken up on.

"Any sleep at all is welcome in my eyes, sistery," said Oswin moodily. Then she stopped and stared. "What's that in your other hand?"

"Oh," Clara noticed she still had the letter. "I have been cordially invited to attend an audience viewed episode of 'Join Me And Dine'. To take place on Tuesday, June 11th, 2763." She quoted the invitation exactly. Then she pointed at the coffee table where Miss Oswald's letter remained. Oswin frowned and took her own letter.

"You just read it out, didn't you?"

"...Yes, there's no law," Clara said defensively, shifting her weight when Oswin turned the page over and carried on searching the envelope. Clara sidled over. "Looking for clues!?" she shouted right in Oswin's ear, who jumped.

"Don't shout at me!" she gasped, kicking aimlessly in Clara's general direction, though she missed. "So is this, like, a cooking show? We don't have to cook do we?"

"Says you, my cooking skills are on par," said Clara.

"Clara, please. Do not cook," she said, genuinely frightened by the prospect, "You'll put us all at risk if you do. Even me. And I'm dead. I don't want to die again, Clara, _please, _I am begging you, do not-"

"Christ, fine! I was only joking anyway!"

"Never play with fire, sister," she said wisely. Clara just shook her head, brimming with offense. "But you don't actually think we'll have to cook, do you?"

"God, I hope not. Or save us all," she muttered. "'Time's it?" she asked a few moments later, looking around for a clock, or a watch, or anything.

"I don't know and I don't care because I haven't showered for over a year, so if you'll excuse me..." she slunk away.

"Err... We have to be in the TV studio by three, so..." Clara said half to herself after re-scanning the invitation, by then Oswin had left. "Great..." she wandered around making noises to herself looking for food, discovering very quickly that there was none. 'Are you hungry?' '_What are you doing? Why are you speaking to me when I'm in the shower. Yes I'm hungry, unless you're cooking, then I'm ill_.' 'Well we have no food.' '_Fascinating. So am I the magical food princess or something?'_

_"_Are you the what now?" she said aloud as well as thinking while she looked around for any signs of life before they'd materialised. "Ooh, room service!" she chirped when she found a menu next to the microwave. "Do they do breakfast... Eggs, yum... Bacon... Oh my stars, they still have Full English's in the 27th century!" She had no clue if Oswin was listening to her rambling. "I haven't had eggs for... Well, for a while... Weeks, probably... Room number... Room number... Ah-ha, keycard says... Floor fifteen, room 12H... Hang on is... Dammit... I hate my subconscious!" she shouted loudly. '_And I hate you! So will you be quiet for just ten minutes?_' "FINE!" Clara shouted, and then she glowered and went to sit on the sofa and merely wait for Oswin to reappear.

Her reappearence happened to only be a brief amount of time later, however.

"You owe me a shower now, Clars," she said, pacing about with wet hair.

"What? Why?"

"Because instead of having a luxurious shower in a probably five star hotel, I'm coming to make sure you're okay."

"Of course I'm okay, I'm the Queen of Okay," she said coldly.

"Are you and your husband actually the same person?_That_ explains why I fancy you both..." And then Clara retaliated by lighting her first cigarette of the day and Oswin groaned. Clara wondered how long it would take for her to figure it out. "What's wrong, Clara?"

"This is the hotel Rose and Jack dumped us on that stupid honeymoon," Clara said.

"Us?"

"Me and the Doctor."

"Your sex holiday?"

"It's not... Yes, fine, my _sex holiday_. Eurgh. It's just bad memories."

"Even the part where you-"

"Go finish having your shower, Oswin." Clara got up and went to open the windows the stop the smell of smoke from clinging.

"I already got dressed, _I'll_ get room service. You wanted eggs?"

"No, I've changed my mind. Pancakes," she said.

Five minutes later Oswin had procured them some pancakes, and they were apparently on their way up with the magical food princess, or prince, whichever happened to be available.

"So the part where you and him-" Oswin began, but Clara cut her off.

"What about it? You're not having details."

"Why? You didn't say it _wasn't _a bad memory. Is it?"

"It's not a memory, full stop."

"Wait... Hang on... Are you telling me you don't remember the first time you shagged the Doctor?_The_ Doctor!?" she gasped.

"Possibly..."

"Were you drunk?"

"Um... Sort of... Maybe..."

"Were you!?"

"Yes, okay! Yes I was very drunk! But he doesn't know that I was drunk, he thinks he was sensational."

"Can't have been that 'sensational' if you don't remember," she said. "Do you have a lot of secrets from him then? There's this, and the smoking, I can't decide which is worse. Oh, and your sexuality. Doesn't know about that, does he?"

"Well he's never actually asked."

"I think the fact that you like to sleep with girls just as much as guys is something you ought to disclose to your husband," advised Oswin.

"When he asks, I will tell," she said, but then breakfast arrived and Oswin just walked off to go answer the door while Clara lingered in the background and yawned - that was until the conversation pricked her interest and she slowly walked over.

"...Big fan of your show," said the guy at the door. "Remarkable someone like you can't just rustle something up."

"I, er..." said Oswin, taken aback.

"Sorry, this might be a bit unprofessional, but could I have your autograph?" he asked.

"Er... No, sorry, I don't just give out autographs," said Oswin. 'Get rid of him.' '_Yeah, I'm sort of trying._' Clara was hovering just behind the door out of sight of their 'visitor'.

"Oh, please, I have all your books!" he said.

"Yeah, could I just have my breakfast?"

"Can't I at least have a photo?"

"Can't I at least have some privacy?"

"I'll pay! I'll pay for even more than a photo," he coerced.

"No thanks. I'm not a prostitute." She tried to slam the door but apparently he was holding it open.

"That's not what your husband says in all the papers."

"My husband is a liar and a cheat, and whatever he says, I did not sleep with those people," and then she kicked him and slammed the door completely shut, holding two plates of pancakes. "Ew. What a freak."

"Why did he think you were a famous person?" Clara asked.

"Um, probably because your echo is a famous person..? Bit obvious..."

"Oh. Right. Well. Pancakes?"

* * *

There were booming knocks on the door and Oswin toppled from her chair, and would have hurt herself had Clara not levitated her off the ground, but before she could utter her thank-yous, a voice yelled brazenly from the outside of the room.

"What the hell do you think you're playing at now, accosting staff members and switching rooms!?" shouted... Martha Jones!? Oswin, who had now pulled herself up, gave her a bewildered look. Martha knocked again. "I know you're bloody in there, Oswald! Get out here! Or do you have someone in there? AGAIN!?"

"Christ, someone has to go shut her up," Oswin whispered to Clara as Martha continued yelling.

"'Shut her up'? We're not the mafia!"

"First of all, what? Second of all, I was not implying we_kill her_. Third of all, your _last_ echo was in the mafia. And, fourth of all, how do _you_ know we're not the mafia?" she said. Clara glared, but tiptoed over to the door, and opened it, and Martha burst straight in.

"You have done a lot of things lately, but this!? Did you try and rape him!?" Martha demanded of Clara, who stared around for Oswin's help, but her sister had apparently decided to hide behind the cabinets. '_Can you blame me!? I saw what she did to your face, Clary._'

"No - What? Who!? The bloke from the kitchens!? For the record, he was all over my - my... me!" she shouted back.

"Oh yeah, sure, that's what you ALWAYS say! And - what happened to your eye?" she asked.

"W-what..?" Clara stammered. Her eye? Her eye had been perfectly, irrevocably fine.

"It was blue last night! Make up have been bricking it trying to figure out how to conceal that for today's show!"

"Show..? Make up..?"

"Er, the make up department for Join Me And Dine? Blimey, how much have you drunk? Are you hung over again? I've told you, you can't do the show when you're drunk!" '_Who the hell is this echo!?_'

"Martha, I'm not who you think I am," Clara said, stepping back, "I just look like who you think I am. A lot like. But I'm not, I promise." She was slowly walking backwards towards where Oswin was hiding.

"Yeah, right, you're drunk. You need some coffee. Have you had any?" Martha asked, following and going straight past her to the kettle and other inanimate associates of it, when Clara dragged Oswin back up to her feet.

"Um, no, but, I'm not... You know, I don't even know her name. Something-or-other Oswald. I'm Clara though..."

"'Clara'? You've just swapped the letters round in your own damn name, _Carla_!"

"Ha, your name is Carla," Oswin snickered, and then Martha looked round, and saw the 'identical twins', and almost fainted. Was she even a doctor here? If Rose was a barmaid and Amy was a mobster, who knew?

"Bloody hell..."

"Yeah, I'm Oswin. This is my bae, Clara," she introduced. "They call me the hot one mostly."

"'Bae'? Since when was I your bae? And since when were you the hot one? We look exactly the same, and_I'm_ the hot one."

"I beg to differ."

"I'm the married one," said Clara.

"Yeah, exactly, so _I'm_ the hot one."

"No, you would be the socially inept one. Or the dead one. Or the Dalekanium one."

"Dalekanium is a type of metal, Clara," she said.

"See, you only pointed that out because you know that you can't deny being dead and socially inept," said Clara.

"And _you're_ whiny and easily-distracted and annoying, but I'm the nice one so I wasn't going to tell you that."

"Oh, you and your outstanding niceness, throwing large bits of metal at people and clawing at your relatives' faces," said Clara.

"I'm still the hot one."

"Shut up and tell me what's happening! Both of you!" Martha demanded.

"We don't really know," said Clara, "What we do know, is, mysterious forces are at work, and we've been brought here to help this other Oswald."

"Oh, believe me, she needs all the help she can get... But I know you're not her, too... I don't know... Healthy?" 'Wow, you're dead and you look healthier than our echo here.' '_Be quiet._' "So you don't even know who she is?"

"Nope. We're not from around here."

"And by 'not from around here', what do you really mean?" Martha crossed her arms and stared them both down, and Clara would be lying if she said she wasn't remotely intimidated.

"Just... Not around. Full disclosure is not necessary, Martha Jones, but you have two exact doubles of your missing A-lister right here, and my sister is very willing to help," Clara volunteered Oswin.

"I presume you can cook? You can't be... Related, or whatever you are, to Carla Oswald without being able to cook," said Martha.

"She's a chef!?" they both exclaimed. "Wooow."

"Which means?"

"We can't cook," said Clara, "At all. Not even toast. Or cereal. Which is why we had to get room service, and were totally harassed by that creeper! Who should get fired, as it happens."

"So you're basically use- hang on," Martha said, and then she answered a headset that had started trilling, turning away from them. "Hello? ... Oh thank god, you have no idea how... God, not again... Just get her to wardrobe, and get her coffee, I'll be down in... Hold on, I have another call coming through... Yep, hi, Tom, found her, she's... Oh you are joking... Well is any of it true? Actually, doesn't matter, just get rid of him... I don't know how, figure it out! ... Yeah, sorry about that, Tom said Sam's in the lobby... Yes, I know, I told him to deal with it... Fifteen minutes, Dan. Okay? Bye." She finally hung up on Dan and Tom, not that Clara had any clue who they were. The only name there that stuck in her mind was Sam.

"Who's Sam?" Clara asked slightly shrilly, crossing her arms and shifting her weight around uncomfortably, trying to look as unpertubed as possible and achieving the exact opposite. Oswin gave her a funny look and went to stand someone else.

"Her husband," said Martha, "Soon to be ex-husband, but he keeps preaching loads of crap about her, following her around and saying she slept with hobos and gigalos. He has a restraining order, but he won't stop."

"Oh great," said Clara, rocking on her feet.

"You okay, Clars..?"

"Yeah. Fine."

"Well they've found her," Martha said, "In a linen cupboard."

"Oh GREAT. It just HAD to be a LINEN CUPBOARD!" Clara spun on the spot in frustration and paced a small way before leaning on the side behind her and attempting to hide her pained expression. "I need a cigarette."

"You can't smoke here," said Martha, "disgusting habit if you ask me. But it's not my job to be opinionated." Clara ignored the rule and went over to the already-open window.

"What _is_ your job?" Oswin asked her.

"Me? I'm a PA," said Martha. Clara and Oswin both burst out laughing.

"You're..? A _PA_? For me? A personal assisstant?" Clara spluttered incoherently, and then she took another drag.

"If I didn't get paid as much as I do, I would've quit years ago," she growled.

"Clara, you don't have to smoke that... That _stuff_ to reduce stress. I mean... You didn't smoke at your wedding," Oswin said.

"My wedding? Do you have any clue how stressful that was? With you there looking after kids, and Jack doing the ceremony, and the food... Why do you listen to the Doctor's choice in food? And then everybody got wasted and we had to look after them! We had to_babysit adults_ on our _wedding night_! And you know what, I still haven't had an apology."

"I'm sorry," said Oswin.

"You weren't even there by this point, when they were playing messy twister. Did you know they - they painted Cardiff blue!" she said, crossing her arms and trying not to fidget.

"As much as I don't care about this, we have to go sober up my boss, otherwise one of you two will have to stand in," Martha shouted over the top of Clara complaining about her distasteful wedding night. Clara threw her arms up in defeat and stubbed out the fag in the ashtray on the table, and followed Martha out of the door.

"What does 'not from around here' really mean, then?" Martha asked, checking corriors ahead for more 'fans' of Carla Oswald, the apparently incredibly famous TV chef.

"Just... You know, from... Lands afar," said Oswin in a mystical tone. "We have ventured here with... Er... Great difficulty... And purpose..."

"Yes, on our treacherous voyage through the systems, guided by the blood of our ancestors through turmoil and-" Clara began dryly, mocking Oswin's words which sounded like the dramatic opening prologue of an adventure movie.

"What are you talking about?" Oswin asked her.

"Me? What are _you_ talking about?"

"The mystical journey we've been sent on."

"Oh. You were serious about that."

"Well what else works as a story?"

"...Clones..?"

"...Well I guess that would make sense, but my version is way more interesting, Clary," said Oswin. Clara sighed.

"Right, brilliant... What are we looking for? El Dorado? Atlantis? Troy? Maybe not a city, maybe the Holy Grail? The Queen Anne's Revenge? The Lost Diadem of Ravenclaw?"

"Clara, the Lost Diadem of Ravenclaw isn't real," said Oswin, "And if it is real, it was destroyed in 1998. And I thought you hadn't read Harry Potter?"

"I haven't, but you pick up information here and there," said Clara smoothly. "We're basically time travellers, and it's all very complicated. But we're here to help."

"Okay, well," said Martha, finally getting her answer, "time travel's not possible."

"It is in the future," said Oswin in a how-stupid-are-you voice. Clara shot her a glare to try and make her be polite, but her resounding bad mood for the past two trips was still holding up.

"Sorry about my sister," said Clara.

"So, is Carla your sister too..? Or clones, like you said?"

"Yeah, Clara-Wara. Is she our sister too?" Oswin challenged. It was like every step they made was writ in sand, and every day Oswin needed some sort of reassurance she wasn't just another of Clara's random echoes. But if she said Carla Oswald _wasn't _their sister, then what other explanation was there to why they were completely identical?

"No, no," said Clara, "I mean it's complicated, but... She's not our sister." Oswin seemed to perk up from that moment, although Clara hoped she knew it was her job to think of some other reason why they looked exactly the same. Well, at least they were being more honest than yesterday.

"She's a drunk, that's what she is," said Martha coldly. Clara and Oswin shared a curious frown. Clara knew that Oswin was just as bad a drinker as she was, only the difference was she could no longer get drunk.

"But what _kind_ of drunk?" Oswin asked, taking the initiative. Martha gave them a questioning look, and they both smiled identically as if this was a completely normal question asked under completely normal circumstances.

"You're both weirdos," said Martha.

"Yeah, but we're attractive weirdos," said Clara.

"S'true," agreed Oswin.

"The worst kind of drunk," said Martha, "I don't know how long it's been since she was sober. The sex, the violence... I don't know what's worse..."

"Sex!?" Oswin exclaimed.

"Violence!?" Clara exclaimed at the exact same time. And then she scowled at Oswin, "Nice to see you have your priorities in order!"

"I'm sorry!"

"Urgh, nevermind," muttered Clara.

"Only a matter of time before she starts on the drugs, but we've managed to stop that happening. That's me, Dan and Tom. Dan's the director and Tom's her PR manager," said Martha, "You know what they say - _she's the talent_. For a while now we've been trying to bring in another chef, you know, take some of the pressure off her, and ween her away from the public eye and eventually take her off the show."

"You want to take her off the air? Why?" Oswin asked.

"She's been at the centre of nine public scandals in the last year, cheating on her husband. He's a low-life though. He has a restraining order now, but he keeps refusing to sign the divorce papers. Apparently... Actually I shouldn't tell you two," said Martha.

"What? Why?" Clara asked.

"Well alright then. They're planning on giving them both subpoenas and making them sign a new set of papers, but you can't tell her that," Martha whispered. And then they walked into the lobby, only the lobby was split into two by a wall of screens with silhouettes on the other side, writhing and producing an awful lot of cuss-laced noise. Clara cringed as they ducked through the room, one of the receptionists giving Martha first an apologetic look, and then she actually fainted when she saw there were two of them. "Crap..." Martha stopped and pulled out a device that looked like a pager, only more futuristic. And apparently it made calls.

"Hi... Yeah, Dan, can you send a doctor to the lobby? ... Just one of the staff's fainted, and nobody else is here... No, I don't know where they've gone... Better check the corridors... What do you mean you've lost her? Again!? How, exactly, did you accomplish that!? ... Of course you don't... Well someone's going to have to look for her now... Yeah. I'll figure something out. As usual. It's always me..." and then Martha hung up on Dan the Director, whoever he was, and rounded on the other two. "Do you think you could wear masks or something?" They both wore the same eyebrows-raised, _I-can't-believe-you-just-asked-that_, offended expression, and Martha merely said, "Ugh." Then she walked off again and they stayed a few steps back.

'Maybe we should though?' Clara suggested telepathically. '_Well, you just put a bag on your head, Clara, and I won't because I'm fabulous._' Oswin was wearing a blank expression when Clara glared at her, walking a step ahead.

Whatever hotel they were in was regal and fancy and Clara instantly felt a sense she didn't belong in somewhere like that, and wondered if her disorderly echo felt like that too. She mused what it would be like to be famous. At least, famous for something that wasn't dying a lot, or marrying an alien, or being the girl who ran away from her family for five months with a random bloke.

"...her, Clars?" Oswin asked.

"Hmm? Sorry?" Clara said, she hadn't been listening.

"I said can't you find her?"

"I, er... How, exactly, would I 'find her'?"

"Well don't you have like a spider sense? Like, do you get a weird feeling whenever one of them is near?" Oswin asked. Clara had no idea if she were being serious or not and just shook her head.

"No, not as far as I'm aware," said Clara. Then Oswin snickered to herself. "What are you thinking? You're doing that face you do when you think of a bad pun."

"You don't have sonar?" Oswin asked.

"I... What?"

"You know... _Echo location_?"

"Oh my... Don't even speak to me," growled Clara, carrying on her path of being just ahead of her sister, who was now chortling to herself, and caught up with Martha Jones, PA.

"Eurgh, what's that smell?" Martha asked suddenly. Clara sniffed and they both paused. She was reminded of a partiularly hot summer stuck away somewhere in her memory, when in the heat she'd groggily made her way through humid air and warm streets to the nearest butcher's to do some shopping for her parents, to find the freezers had broken and all the meat was rotting. She'd carefully gotten out of being made to purchase some slimey bacon and had to walk even further to another shop.

"Sort of smells like meat," Clara said. It made her nose wrinkle, but she and Martha were both following the stench now to find the source, and then they found a partially-open door, and the sight was horrendous.

"What? What is it?" Oswin asked, lingering behind them. Perhaps she recognised this smell, too. Clara just shook her head as Martha nudged the door further open with her toes, and the red came fully into sight.

It was pooling around the form of a man, lying on the flood, the blood still glistening and staining the cream carpet a rusty brown with little shiny blots where it had yet to start drying, though all of it was still wet. Clara instantly went sombre, and the desire to look away from the scene was over-powering as slowly her eyes focused in on the details. He was curved against a desk as though he had fallen onto it, his arms bent out awkwardly and his mouth lolling open unnaturally, like it was dislocated. Blood trickled from the sides of his eyes where forks had been stabbed straight through, and a steak knife was lying on the floor with bloody fingerprints. But the most shocking part was the overflowing belly of the corpse, slashed open and the innards pulled out by hand, left orange and hanging down over his legs. This carving was the main source of the bleeding, after the slit throat.

Martha ran out of the room. Clara's head turned slightly, about to look after her, but she didn't quite manage the motion and just met the confused eyes of her sister, who had not looked in the room yet.

"What is it, Clara?"

"A body," Clara said eventually, stepping out of the room, checking she didn't trail blood out with her. She waved her hand and the door closed on its own. "You don't want to see it. Lots of murder in our heads..."

"Murder?" Clara wanted to say something along the lines of, _Well he didn't pull his OWN intestines out_, but there were all kinds of wrong with that being her sentence. Instead she just nodded, and shuffled away from the room, looking back, and then gasping in horror. On the door, laminated and stuck there lop-sidedly, were four words: _Carla Oswald. Dressing Room_.

"Oh god," she said, then she glanced around. Where had Martha gone? Had she gone to get the police? The crew? If any of them showed up, one or both or them, would be arrested. "Where'd Martha go?"

"She said toilets," said Oswin. Clara just nodded and drew the sonic screwdriver from her pocket, rolling it between her palms and fidgeting whilst looking off somewhere else, before Martha returned. Apparently she was weak-stomached here, which was the complete opposite of her real-life counterpart.

"This is all getting really bad," Martha said, pacing around and ignoring her buzzing comm device. "First she goes missing last night, then you two show up, and now there's a dead member of the kitchen staff in her dressing room, killed by kitchen utensils! And we still don't know where she is."

"We'll look," offered Clara. Oswin looked taken aback by this declaration, but didn't admit an objection. She was thinking along the lines of they just walk through the rooms while phasing, sweeping the floors quickly and keeping out of sight of anyone who might be lurking.

"Why do you show up today? Of all days?" Martha asked pointedly, giving them suspicious eye.

"We just go where we're needed," Clara shrugged, "apparently that's here, today."

"I'm not even gonna pretend to understand," said Martha, "Just... Just stay out of sight, and stay upstairs. If you find her, then... I don't know..."

"I'm like, an incredibly amazing genius, I'll figure something out," bragged Oswin.

"You couldn't have gone a _bit_ longer?" Clara asked.

"I'm not pretending for you anymore, Clara," said Oswin.

"What are you even talking about?"

"_Us_!"

"Please be quiet now," was all Clara said, sighing. Oswin looked annoyed and bored, but thankfully did stop her smoke-warranting conversation there.

"I'm not gonna call the cops, just keep people awag from the room," said Martha, "otherwise they'll want to arrest her, and she cannot get arrested with such a big appearence this afternoon on galactic TV. Not now... I am so out of a job after today..."

Martha paused, looking like she didn't want to trust them, but then decided she didn't have a choice, and went away grudgingly.

"So, what did the body look like?" Oswin asked.

"He sort of... Had his innards ripped out, and forks stabbed in his eyes... There was a lot of blood," Clara said.

"My god, are you alright?" Oswin asked seriously, glancing at the closed dressing room door.

"Fine, I've seen worse," said Clara darkly, remembering her run-in with Grand Marshal Skaldak. Oswin didn't press the matter any further.

"Are you sure you can't... I don't know, 'sense her'? Or something? It wouldn't be too farfetched," said Oswin carefully.

"No, I cannot sense them. Alright? Let's just look," said Clara, shaking her head and walking off to find stairs, her sister at her heels, not saying an awful lot until she declared she'd downloaded plans for the whole building so they could find their way around, though Clara did point out that wouldn't be any use unless they got lost and Oswin looked disappointed, but Clara thought little of it and finally found the stairs up to the next floor.

They hardly spoke, instead focusing on ducking around corners and checking what was ahead of them and trying not to bump into more 'fans', and then Oswin finally got bored and started thinking aloud.

"Who'd want to frame her?" she mused, "If she's as famous as she seems, then surely they don't think they'll get away with it?"

"What makes you so sure she's been framed? Maybe she's just mental?" Clara suggested, trying to discern if a room was empty by looking at it.

"Occupied," Oswin answered. Clara looked over and saw she'd hacked into the hotel bookings or something. "Apparently her room is five floors up."

"But she was in a linen cupboard."

"...Maybe we should look for clues?"

"We're not detectives, Oswin," said Clara, shaking her head and walking off.

"Didn't hear you saying that when we accosted Jack the Ripper," said Oswin, "Or when we found out what happened to the Swallow."

"I am having a bad day. I am sorry. Do what you like," Clara said simply, shrugging.

"Dead bodies really freak you out then?"

"Mutilated ones do, I don't think it's too much of a weakness. Lots of people don't like seeing people all... Cut open..."

"...I couldn't cut someone open," said Oswin, "Do you think this echo could?"

"Well she can cook, so who knows what else she can do?" And then Oswin laughed. "What?"

"Just the fact that your scale of how capable someone is relies on their culinary skills," Oswin said. Clara didn't say anything, just sat down against the wall. "So you're not fine?"

"I have no idea. I just want to sit down. Actually, no, I would quite like to go to sleep, and then I would like to wake up back on the TARDIS with my husband and my home and some tea," said Clara. Oswin sat down opposite her, across the hallway.

"You're... You're basically in a coma, Clara," said Oswin.

"...Is this supposed to make me feel better..?"

"You remember how I mentioned they could use an EMP? Well, they did. If we didn't have a mind patch, you'd be fine, and I'd be switched off. But because of the connection, you're... Well, here. But they can't sustain an EMP forever, if anything I'm sure your husband will demand a truce if it goes on for too long."

"Am I dead?"

"No. You're not dead," said Oswin, "You'd know if you were. Time moves differently in your head. To me and you, it's been nearly two days. To them, it could be nearly two weeks. Or it could be nearly two minutes. I'm sure they'll get you out."

"What about you?"

"Well yeah, me too, but I wasn't thinking about me. So what do you want to do? Hang out in this nicely furnished hotel for the whole day?" Oswin suggested.

"Oh, you have no idea how much I want to hang out in the nicely furnished hotel all day," Clara said, "But I think we have to help her."

"We'll hide the body, cover it all up and send her to rehab. Job done, everyone wins. Who even was the dead guy?"

"Apparently one of the kitchen staff, that's what Martha said," Clara told her. "If she's as much of an alcoholic nympho as she sounds, I doubt she's sober enough to carry out a murder like that, especially on some bloke."

"If only we had Rose and we could just teleport," Oswin said, "Or I was dead again." And then she brought up her screens and scanned whatever database, or search engine, she'd brought up incredibly quickly. "Holy..."

"What?"

"Nine public scandals, Clars," said Oswin. "In the last two years! She keeps getting drunk and shagging guys."

"Just guys..?" Clara dared to ask.

"Remarkably, yes, it appears you may have a straight echo," Oswin said. "Must be a miracle... I would guess that someone has a lot to gain from framing her for murder."

"Who?" Clara asked.

"Ugh, I don't know... Martha probably has motive enough, says she's been her PA for her entire career, maybe she got her to sign some kind of agreement for money? Maybe Martha just really hates her? But then Dan the Director lost sight of her pretty easily, maybe trying to give her a weak alibi? We don't know anything about Tom whatshisface, or Sam the sleazy ex-husband with the restraining order," said Oswin.

"Are we playing Cludeo?"

"Pfft, apparently... Stupid whodunnit... Maybe it was you, Clara Oswald. Name stealer."

"Get over it, _Winny_," said Clara. Oswin opened her mouth to retort, but just grumbled and said nothing.

"Maybe _I_ did it," she said quietly.

"Oswin, you were asleep this morning," said Clara. "I remember, you were snoring sooo loud. I thought there was another leopard or something."

"First, I do not snore, Clara. Just ask... Um... I don't know I'm sure there's someone. One of my brothers," she said. Clara did not know Oswin had any brothers, but before she could pursue it, Oswin carried on speaking. "What _is_ the thing with the leopard? You keep mentioning it."

"Right, okay," Clara said, glad of the opportunity to finally retell this story to someone other than the Doctor, who still refused to believe it even happened, "Just let me set the scene. So. My dear-sweet other half had finally, after weeks of begging, convinced me to sleep overnight on the TARDIS. I was against this mainly because the TARDIS happens to want my head on a spike, but also because of his questionable motives - this was before we were married. But anyway, the night he persuades me, I was convinced he was gonna try and kiss me or something. He calls me into the console room, and says he has some errand to run on some planet, I don't remember - no I wasn't drunk this time, before you ask - and says he'll just be a few hours and I should go to sleep.

"I'm understandably annoyed about this, because he gets me to sleep and then leaves? Really? I just thought he was an idiot. I still do. So he leaves, and I go try to find my new bedroom or whatever, which I distinctly remember as being around the hall. I go to the door, open it, and a leopard jumps out. Yes, it was a hologram leopard, but it was still a bloody leopard! It was terrifying and it chased me, and I was petrified right up until it ran straight through me and off down a corridor somewhere.

"So I go to the console room and have a really embarrassing conversation with the TARDIS about the Doctor bringing a girl home, and she shows me ALL of his past companions. Well, past female ones... Honestly, this is before I even knew he had others-"

"Ooh, were you jealous?"

"No, just annoyed he never told me," she said. "But then, after that, I tried to leave to go find my actual bedroom, and then someone appears. And it was me, and she's like, 'I'm you, from tomorrow night'-"

"Was she hot?"

"What? Be quiet, this one actually WAS me, not like you," said Clara, "but then she made loads of them. Loads of me. Everywhere. And two of them were talking about how they got off with each other or something."

"That's gross."

"Hypocrite."

"Well, I've now decided that you, Clara Oswald, have one _hell_ of a fetish for yourself," Oswin stood up and started walking away. Clara swore at her, but hastened to follow as she lead them towards the stairs now the mood had been lightened a little with the tale of Clara's past exploit.

"At least I don't snore."

"I don't snore!"

"I'll ask Adam Mitchell."

"Don't start that again," said Oswin.

"Sorry," Clara apologised. Oswin said nothing as they carried on up the stairs.

When they walked out of the door to the floor 'Carla Oswald' was meant to be staying, however, a large lump of brunette (kind of smelly) mass toppled out from nowhere and nearly knocked Oswin cold onto the floor.

"What the hell was that? Are you okay?" Clara asked, rushing over to her sister's aid, but her sister was wide-eyed and supporting somebody else.

"Are all your echoes arseholes, Clara? Except me?" she asked, glaring as she turned around the dreary human. Which was definitely Clara's echo, no mistake about it. Carla gurgled. "This is disgusting, please save me." Clara went over to half support the disorderly version of herself.

"Where's the nearest empty room that's not hers?" Clara asked, dragging her along.

"This way," Oswin said, in control of steering and the direction they were going. "Unlock it? Please? Sistery?"

"Don't call me that," Clara said, sticking her hand through the wood of the door Oswin was pointing to and unlocking it from the other side. She kicked it open and they pulled Carla inside, locking it again. Oswin went and held Carla steady, kneeling in front of her.

"Okay, Carla, we're going to talk, and you're _not_ going to vomit on my face," said Oswin from underneath her. Carla seemed to nod. '_Go find a bowl._' Clara tiptoed away into the bathroom to find a bowl, or any such utensil. 'There is no bowl.'

"Hey Carla," Clara heard Oswin said, "Do you wanna go on a trip to the bathroom and sit by the toilet? Yeah? Good." And a moment later Oswin was half-carrying Carla Oswald, the famous TV chef, into the bathroom and sitting her on the closed-lidded toilet and showing her where the sink was.

"How are you dealing with her? She doesn't know what's going on and she's drunk," Clara said, lingering away from her sister, who then gave her a disbelieving look. "What?"

"This is you, when you're drunk. And I always get stuck looking after you," Oswin said, "Only this one isn't spewing profanity." She smiled slightly. "Now I want you to tell me how much you've had to drink."

"...Some..." was the first word she spoke.

"Yes, I know some, but how much some, as exact as you remember?" Carla then shrugged. "Okay forget about that... You haven't had any drugs, have you?"

"Nah..."

"Good. Do you know who I am, at all? Or her?" she pointed at Clara, "Either of us." Carla nodded. "Alright, that would be a start. Now, we are the only ones on your side."

"Wha' 'bout Martha?"

"We don't know about Martha, but we are here to help you and only you," Oswin told her, "A man is dead."

"...Who?"

"One of the kitchen staff, Carla. You have to be honest with us, did you kill him?"

"I din'... No-one... Cupboard," she grunted slowly. Clara didn't know how Oswin could even stand to make sense of these words, it was going completely over Clara's head.

"That's good, that's very good. Now, who would want to frame you? You have to try and answer this, it is really important... No, don't... Carla... No... Bollocks..." she said when Carla started snoring, and she stood up. "Well she certainly hasn't killed anybody."

"I don't think she has the strength," Clara said, giving her echo a distasteful look.

"_Hypocrite_," Oswin sang very under her breath when she walked past.

"Oi!" Clara shouted after her, "I'm not that bad."

"Honey, you are SO much worse," Oswin said, closing the door on Clara, who locked it behind her sister and then walked through the wood into the next room, which was dark and small but still had some sort of early-1900s feel. She supposed it was a themed hotel.

"Well I think it's Sam," Clara said curtly, nodding. In actuality, she would refuse to voice any other theory. In her mind, the crude representation of 'Noisy Sam' was the only possible person who did it. And since they were currently stuck in her mind...

"Seems a little cliché," Oswin said. Clara shrugged. "Well you can investigate the ex-husband, Clars, I'm going to find Martha and explain what we just saw." She left the room and Clara followed swiftly, checking the corridor for people who would be rather shocked to see two clones of a famous TV personality walk out of a random room.

"Which was what, exactly?"

"Which was that she isn't a murderer, just a slut," Oswin said.

"How many times, it is not okay to call people sluts. It isn't your business how many people she wants to sleep with," Clara said firmly and clearly. Oswin glared, unhappy Clara hadn't sided with her slander. "I'll go find Sam then, you go find Martha."

Oswin went one way, and Clara went the other. In the past, splitting up to look for murderers hadn't really gone according to plan. And once again, Clara was the one looking for the the supposed 'murderer'.

* * *

___Oswin_

Oswin did not think for one second that Sam the ex-husband was the real murderer, but her sister was in a bad mood, and she was letting Clara humour herself on a few hours of a pointless escapade while _she_searched for Martha.

In reterospect, Oswin didn't know whether to count this as a success or a failure. She did find Martha, although Martha happened to be knocked out with her hands tied to the top of a door while her whole body slumped and dragged her down. This was what Oswin Oswald saw when she regained consciousness, the 'sleeping' body of Martha Jones, PA, and she knew Martha wasn't the killer. Unfortunately, she was also tied up to something in a very similar way.

She shuffled backwards and felt for wall behind her, but there was none. She was half-suspended from a light fixture in a dingy bathroom with no windows. And it was freezing.

And it was then she realised this was no bathroom, she and Martha were crammed in a meat locker with bloodstained walls and yellowing tiles from decades of housing dead carcasses. What a joyful place the inside of Clara's head was, she pondered. Until a crowbar was swung at her legs and she lost balance and felt her arms pull with her full weight.

She had indisputably been kidnapped by a psychopath, and her head was ringing and something warm was dripping over her eye. She blinked and her eyelashes were sticky and crimson, and she squinted through this liquid and tried to find her attacker.

"Who's there..?" she asked, staring wildly at the room. All she saw was Martha.

"Don't pretend you don't remember me, Carla," the killer said in a soft but sadistic voice. A voice which clung to something in the back of her memory.

"I'm not... I... Who are you?" Oswin said, deciding the best path of action was probably pretending to be Carla Oswald. She strained in her mind to put a face to the voice, to remember how, exactly, she had ended up unconscious in a meat locker. Moments ago she'd left Clara... She'd been walking... And then she'd blacked out.

"I am your salvation," he breathed. He was crazy, and she could hear him pacing behind her, his seemingly bare feet sliding in old blood and grease.

"Okay..." was all she said. '_Clara!? Seriously Clara, are you there!?_' she was trying to scream in her head. Who knew what happened if she died in the dream? Maybe Clara had been right and it WAS like the Matrix. Maybe she'd never wake up. "You should probably let me go..."

"Oh? You and your assistant?"

"Yeah, please..."

"Martha Jones kills Carla Oswald in a meat locker in a rage, the murder of Tyler Valenti tipping her over the edge. And then she gets stuck in here, and dies of hypothermia," he said. Why did they ALWAYS tell you their whole plan? '_CLARA EFFING OSWALD YOU COME AND SAVE ME!_' she was suddenly in a panic, ordering Clara to come to her rescue. 'Where are you? You went dark!' '_I'M IN A MEAT LOCKER WITH A PSYCHO!_'

"Why do you want to kill Ca... Er, me? What did I ever do to you!?" she demanded, trying to shout so loud either someone found her or Martha woke the hell up and... Well she was unsure of what she wanted Martha to do, anything, really. And then he walked out, and she instantly recognised him. This was the same member of the staff who had delivered their food that morning, and he was twirling a crowbar as if it were a baton in his hands and grinning manically. She struggled to get away from him, but she was still tied up on a short rope and merely made it worse for herself. He laughed.

"You didn't let me get your photo, Carla... I punsihed the man who made the pancakes though," he was walking around her in a circle. Oh, so the chef was the dead guy.

"Oh... Should've just... Rapped him on the knuckles a few times... I'm sure he would've got the message," she said, watching out of the corner of her eye for him to come back round in front of her again. '_CLARA I'M NOT KIDDING!_' 'I don't know where you are!' '_KITCHENS PROBABLY, I DON'T KNOW!_'

"Maybe you should show him how you're meant to cook..." the psycho waitor guy breathed into her ear down her neck and she scrabbled away from him, desperately fighting against the ties.

"How do I do that, if he's... Dead..." she gulped, watching him very carefully and on the verge of hyperventilating if a certain sister of hers didn't come and save her and Martha from very awful deaths.

"He's still here," he hissed, "Well, his eyes are." And then a pair of mushy, partially mutilated eyeballs hooked on dirty string was held out in front of her face and she screamed when the bloodied pupils rolled to face her and a gnarled hand was clamped around her mouth. "Shh... Don't scream, Carla..." 'Are you sure you're in immediete danger?' Clara asked, just as the eyeballs were dropped - _squelch_ - onto the floor in front of her, and then she caught the unmistakable sound of a switchblade flicking out. '_YES I AM IN IMMEDIETE DANGER CLARA! HE HAS A KNIFE!_'

"Well you showed him... Can I go now..?" she croaked, leaning away from him as best she could, burning her wrists and palms in the ropes keeping her there.

"I finally have you where I want you, Carla... After all these years..." he said. He was a stalker as well as an insane murderer.

"Do you think you could wait a few more years?"

"I finally have you all to myself... Or I will soon, Carla..." he said very quietly now, and then he drew up the blade, waved it in the light in front of her and brought it to her neck as she kept fighting and trying to get away, but it was no use.

He was suddenly thrown backwards by some kind of force Oswin couldn't see, and she heard him smash into a wall when someone took her hands and they melted through the rope and she dropped to the floor, now free.

"Clara?" she asked.

"Well, who else would it be?" Clara asked, running over to free Martha too, who woke up when she fell to her hands and knees on the cold floor.

"I seriously love you right now," said Oswin, clawing her way back to her feet. She rounded back to see, however, that the bloke trying to murder her was not unconscious or dead, merely staggering upright.

"What the..?" he asked, looking between Oswin and Clara. "There are two of you?"

"Three," said Clara, "Did you try and hurt my sister?_No-one_ hurts my sister, especially not you!" Clara shouted, marching over to him. He swung his crowbar right through Clara's head, losing control of it and letting go, sending it spinning across the floor to Oswin.

Before she really knew what she was doing, she'd picked up the crowbar, and sent it whistling through the air like a boomerang, and there was a crunching sound and a choke when it lodged itself in his neck, and he collapsed to the floor. Clara looked scared of Oswin at that moment, as she glared and breathed deeply at the gasping man.

"He's not dead," Oswin said coldly, "if he goes to hospital now he'll live."

"I can't believe you just..." Clara said, and then adrenaline stopped working its magic on her head and right leg, and it buckled and she nearly fell over, clutching her wet, bloodied hair where the wound was.

"It's time for the show," Martha said suddenly when Clara went to hold Oswin up and stop her falling.

"I... What?" the latter asked.

"Where's Carla?"

"Upstairs somewhere, passed out," Clara shrugged.

"We can keep this secret," said Martha, "All of it, we do not need a scandal like this." 'She can't be serious?' '_That's how TV people work_.'

"He just tried to kill you!" Clara said, pointing at the killer on the floor, who was still conscious.

"The show must go on! You have to stand in!" Martha ordered her.

"...What?"

"Well she can't do it!" Martha pointed at Oswin, who was bleeding from two places. Oswin smiled apologetically.

"I can't cook!"

"I'll read you the recipe," Oswin said, and then she quickly added, "...Through an earpiece..."

"No! NO! No, no, no, no, NO! NO WAY _IN HELL_!"

* * *

_'Honestly, it's easy, just like... Buying shoes. You're buying shoes__,' _Oswin thought. Clara was standing in the wings waiting to go onto the stage before an audience of about a thousand people, and cook. And Oswin could not be happier that it wasn't her out there.

She didn't know what magic Martha had worked to get the whole crew of 'Join Me And Dine' to pay her no notice to the two doubles of their star, but she was grateful for it. Especially when they brought her coffee and she got her leg and head bandaged up. And now she was flicking through one of Carla Oswald's recipe books searching for Foie Gras, which was what apparently had been promised on that day's episode.

"I still don't see why ordering out doesn't count as cooking," Oswin grumbled on Clara's behalf.

Martha gave her a look of death, before saying, "They have paid a lot of money. Stop whining. At least it's not you out there." And then Oswin shut her mouth, and finally found the page on Foie Gras.

'What is foie gras anyway?' Clara asked psychically. '_It's duck liver, Clars_.' 'Ducks have a liver?' '_Yes, Clars._' 'Do I have a liver?' '_Not with the amount you drink, no... Yes, honey, you have a liver._' 'Okay...'

"We're about to go live," Dan said, dashing about and reading off a clipboard. Clara looked back at her sister when she heard that, and Oswin gave her a thumbs up.

"You'll be fine! Just read what it says on the cameras! Break a leg," she called over. Clara did not look any less nervous, but took a deep breath, and when Martha did the count down, she stepped out to applause and waved. _Oh dear god, help us all..._ Oswin thought to herself, switching positions to watch on one of the monitors. Oswin thought she were going to die of second-hand embarrassment right there and then.

She barely listened to a world Clara was spewing on screen, trying depserately to sound like she knew what she was doing. '_Okay, now just get a bowl..._' Oswin watched Clara on the screen. '_No, that's a colander. Put it back and get... That's a sieve. Clara, a bowl. Round without holes..._' Clara was rooting through cupboards until she finally found a bowl. '_Go get the chopping board... The red one._' 'Does it have to be red?' '_Yes._' 'Why? I found a green one.' '_Red means meat. Green means vegetables. White means fish._' 'I thought fish was meat?' '_Doesn't matter what fish is, you're cooking duck, which IS a meat. So the red one... That's a bread board, put it back..._' It went on like this for a while, Clara talking nonsense to try and keep interest while Oswin guided her very carefully and slowly through everything it said in the recipe book.

It was actually going rather well by Oswald-standards, until measurements were required. '_Half a cup of sauce._' 'What's a cup?' '_It's a thing you drink out of._' 'No, I know that, but how much is it?' '_I doubt they're that expensive_.' 'NO, like how much stuff?' '_I don't know!_' 'Well how much does it weigh on scales? In a measuring jug?' '_I don't know, Clara, just get a cup and fill it halfway_!' And that was the moment everything went to hell.

When Oswin finally found out how much a cup was, it was too late, Clara had been filling anything with however much she liked, with little regard for anything else. The edible-looking dish she had been preparing was suddenly dry from salt and then drowned in wine, a pool of of pale liquid on the tray, and then she dumped the sauce. The sauce was meant to be smooth and runny, but instead was congealed and jam-like.

"What the hell is she doing?" Martha asked Oswin, who was looking on in disbelief.

"Clara can't cook," Oswin said. "Clara Oswald has never successfully cooking anything in all twenty-four of her years on this Earth and thereabouts, not even toast or cereal."

"I thought you were joking..."

"Nope. Cancelling the show would have been better than this, but instead you have a dead bloke and a framed star," Oswin said. "I would advise sending Carla Oswald straight to rehab tonight."

"With what money? The company is broke," Martha said, trying to ignore Clara's shouts from the stage. Dan the Director took hold of the situation. He ran out, and took Clara and lead her away by the shoulders. She waved to the public, and Dan returned and quickly plugged her new book, and pulled a perfectly assembled dish from the fridge with the Blue Peter line, "_Here's one she made earlier_," and ended the show.

"Me and Clara will pay," said Oswin, "I'm amazing and rich."

"Was I good, Oswin?" Clara asked, throwing herself down after half an hour. Oswin motioned for one of the stage hands to fetch her a coffee with _everything_. She shared a nervous look with Martha.

"You were great, Clara-Wara, honestly. Couldn't have done better myself," she lied blatantly. She had no doubt Clara knew this was a lie, but it was still comforting to her apparently, as yet another eventful day drew to a close.

* * *

Oswin and Clara Oswald sonicked a large amount of money onto Martha's bank card and said no more about it, although she did question who they were again. Clara simply replied 'guardians', and they walked off mysteriously.

They spent the rest of the night ordering ice cream and popcorn from room service and watching weird, 28th century reality TV.

"Are you alright?" Clara asked Oswin. Clara was curled up in the armchair, and Oswin was sitting with her arms wrapped around both her knees, staring intently at the screen. "You almost killed someone." She elaborated without being asked.

"I knew he'd be fine," she shrugged. "It's not fatal unless we let him bleed out. He might not be able to ever talk again though."

"He almost killed _you_."

"Yep. And Jack the Ripper almost killed _you_ the other day. Then I saved you, and you returned the favour, and now we're even, just like we were this morning," Oswin said flatly.

"Oswin, I didn't save you just to be even," said Clara.

"Well good. I think you should go to bed now, Clara. You never know where you're gonna wake up," said Oswin, seeing her twin yawn and nod sleepily. She got up.

"Or when," she added, going off into the bedroom as Oswin switched off the giant TV. "Goodnight, Oswin."

"Goodnight Clara."


	5. The Case Of The Rainbow Lagoon

**AN: This broke the first time I tried to upload it, not my fault, but still sorry. Anyway, I think this is my favourite chapter so far of this fic.**

_The Case Of The Rainbow Lagoon_

_Clara_

So far, this rated very high on the list of most uncomfortable positions she had ever woken up in, and that was in comparison with various one-night stands and hang overs she had filed away in the dusty recesses of her memories. Mostly, it was so high on her list because her face was squashed by a pair of shoes pressing into her cheek on one side of her face, and rough wood on the other side. The strong smell of salt and rotten trees wasn't pleasant either - nor the heavy swaying motions she were being submitted to.

"...Um... Oswin..?" Clara asked hopefully. She was hoping it was Oswin's feet sticking her to the bloated wood and not somebody else's. The feet jerked and kicked her even harder in the side of the head. "Could you move your feet?" Oswin grunted, and Clara made a note never to grunt again if it sounded that pretentious. "OSWIN!" Oswin finally awoke and kicked Clara _even harder_.

"What?" Oswin gurgled sleepily.

"Your feet."

"Yes, what about them..?"

"They are crushing my brain," Clara said, muffled, her face squashed between rubber soles and bark. Oswin just made a confused noise until Clara reached and took her ankles, moving her feet away somewhere else. "Thanks. Now I have _Converse_ stamped on my skin. Why are your shoes so ratty?"

"_Stranded for a year._ How many times!? What's that smell, anyway? Salt? Are we in a salt factory?"

"They don't make salt in a factory, it comes from the sea," informed Clara.

"You put stuff out of the _sea_ on your _food_ and_eat it_!? What WAS the past..." she said, shocked. Clara imagined she would be shaking her head in some form of resentful disgrace, although it was completely black where they were.

"Um, yes..?"

"Do you know what's _in_ the sea, Clary?"

"Yes. Salt."

"So much faeces," said Oswin quietly and rather scared. "And urine. And other rubbish. And you eat that stuff."

"I don't know what you're complaining about, with those milkshakes. What _were_ they doing to the cows, exactly?" Clara retaliated.

"...Do you have a light?" Oswin changed the subject.

"Have you ever seen the sea before?" Clara said, fumbling in her pockets to see if a lighter had spawned itself in her coat, as it usually seemed to.

"...Have you ever seen the rings of Saturn at sunset before?" Oswin retaliated.

"The sea, Oswin! You've never seen it!? I grew up with the sea out of my bedroom window!" Clara laughed, finally finding the little metal box with its catch and flick lid.

"Come on, it's just a load of water," Oswin said.

"When we wake up, we are going to the seaside. You can get fish and chips and ride a donkey on the beach."

"Why would I want to ride a donkey on the beach..?"

"Because that's what you do when you go to the beach."

"...Why..?"

"You just do, I don't know!"

"Seems a bit cruel to the donkey, making it carry heavy people around all day."

"Are you saying I'm fat!?" Clara asked, the glow from the lighter she lit on the last word illuminating her face, shadows making it look like she was snarling. Oswin leant away in the tiny, dark room in the orange, fearful.

Clara looked around in the gloom, trying to make anything out. All she really saw were boxes and barrels. Oswin frowned at the barrels and sat up, looking in one of the cracks. Clara held the light closer, and Oswin picked a fine powder up off the ground, gasped, dropped it, grabbed Clara's lighter and then put it out in one movement.

"This is gunpowder," she explained.

"We're on a pirate ship."

"We're not on a pirate ship, Clara."

"We're in a wooden vessel, in the sea, full of gunpowder. _Pirate ship_," she said, grinning, even though it was dark.

"What, exactly, is your century's fascination with pirates?"

"It's your history too, no matter how far in the future you're from. Even three-thousand years. I mean, I bet there are space pirates."

"Space pirates? Space pirates don't exist, they're stories told to kids to scare them to sleep. Like, err... I don't know... Mein Kampf."

"Oswin, you don't read Mein Kampf to children. That is fifty shades of screwed up."

"Alright, read them Fifty Shades of Grey, if you insist," Oswin said. And then someone probably heard them talking loudly about fascist ramblings and pornography and space pirates, and a door was opened.

"Hi," they both said identically, even going as far as to both hold up their right hands' and wave. The man was short and stocky with a grubby bandana tied around his head, pushing back greasy, lank hair and showing the muck on his face piled deep into his pores and wrinkles. His eyes were bulging and laced with pricked, red veins, tinged with yellow to match his teeth which shone against his filthy complextion. The smell of sweat and sea and dirt drifted into the store room with them, masking over the metallic smell of gunpowder. The room behind him opened out into more store rooms, though Clara didn't know anything about the anatomy of a galleon.

"I'm Oswin, and this is my sister Clara, and yes we will do sexual favours in exchange for you not killing us," Oswin beamed. Clara kicked her in the face. "OW!"

"Stop trying to pimp me out!" she said while Oswin nursed the side of her face, which seemed to be stuck in an offended gasp from then on, brown eyes a mix of shock and rage. "...That was really satisfying."

"My jaw, Clara! You kicked me in _my jaw_! That's like, the best part of my face! Apart from, you know, all of it," she said. "First you break my nose - the other best part of my face - and now this!? What'll be next - my eyes!? My dimples!?"

"Be quiet," Clara said, but that only seemed to make Oswin more angry.

"This is just because you know _I'm_ the hot one," said Oswin, "So you're lashing out. Because of jealousy."

"Except we're exactly the same, but I have better eyebrows, and I'm socially adept," Clara said, ignoring the stoutly pirate. In fact, there was a crowd gathering around the bickering, identical twins who had just appeared in a room full of gunpowder.

"You don't have better eyebrows."

"Yes I do."

"What if I bruise, Clara? Hmm? Did you think of that?"

"I don't really care."

"You are a terrible human being, and I do not know why the Doctor loves you so much. You can do no wrong in his eyes, urgh. One day I'll show him that you are unloveable," Oswin snapped.

Clara raised her eyebrows in challenge, and said, "Well _you_ love me, so you're really just being a hypocrite, aren't you?"

"You... Just... Blech. Fine. I'm sorry for trying to exploit you to these... Erm... Good sea-farers... Were there that many before..?" Oswin asked quietly. Clara followed her gaze. It seemed the entire crew had gathered around to watch them fight.

"Well, it appears we may have got a bit lost," Clara said, grinning stupidly and getting to her feet, helping Oswin up. Although she kept tight hold of her sister's arm and phased them both, in case they were going to be shot at, or stabbed. "Don't suppose you know the way back to, erm, London?" One of the pirates laughed, but the rest continued to stare.

"We've been at sea for six weeks," the portly, close one explained in a gruff voice, and the others laughed quietly. Were any of them the captain? Knowing their luck they were probably on the Queen Anne's Revenge awaiting Edward Teach's word on the matter.

"...Well that was a very refreshing nap," Clara said, pretending to yawn. "Can we go now?" She knew just as little about ships as she had five minutes prior, but the room they were in seemed to be the crew's quarters (though she was guessing because of the abundance of brown-tinged hammocks). The pirates laughed again.

"We're in unchartered waters," a sallow, gangly looking one with an eyepatch asked (they were VERY stereotypical). "Whaling."

"Whale..?" Oswin half-whispered. Clara frowned at her - what, did she had a whale phobia?

"Aye."

"Great..."

"Anyway," said Clara, "...I'll catch you a whale if you take us to land." They burst out laughing.

"We're looking for a very specific whale, missy," the large one said.

"Yeah, I'll catch it. Easy peasy. I can catch you a... Shark, too," she said. Well, at this point in time, they weren't endangered species, and also they were imaginary. It was about then, when Clara was remembering her fondness of seafood, that she noticed her sister was crushing her arm. "Are you okay?" she asked, but Oswin said nothing.

"Are _you_ okay, girl?" asked a loud and threatening voice from the distance. The gathering around them skittered back to their respective corners and work stations when the wood-rubber-wood-rubber alternations reached her ears, indicating they were dealing with a peg-legged pirate. He was tall and had the terrifying demeanor and image you would commonly expect from the trope conjured out of the brain of a twenty-first century girl. Which meant he was probably ruthless, too. "Promises you can't deliver on. How'd you get on board?"

"...I am an aquatic mammal whisperer. We rode here with a herd of dolphins at my disposal. But I also do whales and sharks," she said, "You should call me... Aqua-Girl." She expected some sort of snarky comment from her sister, but she still said nothing. Just stood there. Petrified.

"Aye, course ya are," he laughed darkly.

"I'll prove it," Clara said, already questioning if it really _was_ possible to just telekinetically drag animals out of the sea. Well, it was her dream, why wouldn't it be possible? It seemed entirely plausible. "If you don't kill us, I will catch you... The biggest whale you've ever seen. Or, the biggest one in this part of the ocean. At least."

"And if not..?" he asked, leaning forwards and breathing his disgusting breath on them, stinking of rum and stale meat.

"There won't be an 'if not'," Clara said, hoping they didn't bring up Oswin's promise of sexual favours.

"You're sure we can't just stay down here? Out of their way? And out of danger?" Oswin spoke up. Clara frowned at her for a while, but Oswin was fixing her gaze on a nail in a distant door frame.

"...I'll catch you your sharks or whatever when I speak with my sister," said Clara. They seemed to be very hospitable pirates, or very sex-deprived and longing for some sort of female contact.

"Biggest whale we e'er saw, you say?"

"Yep. Biggest shark too. Biggest everything, guaranteed," Clara said. Maybe it was unwise to promise so much to what could easily be a boatload of blood-thirsty pirates baying for blood and entertainment of any kind. The captain grunted, but walked off, beckoning for the crew to follow him, except the sleeping ones who remained. "What is your problem?" Clara asked as soon as the door closed, no doubt they were listening though.

"What's _your_ problem!? Promising all that to a bunch of... Scoundrels!"

"It's fine, I know how to use a harpoon, or whatever else they have. It's easy," said Clara. She actually had no clue how to use a harpoon, but she thought it best to lie loudly. "What's wrong? You look terrified."

"It's dangerous on deck."

"Yeah, it's more dangerous down here if we_don't _go on deck," said Clara.

"You can't fall in the sea and drown when you stay here," said Oswin, and then everything clicked into place in Clara's head.

"Of course..." she said to herself, "Why would someone from Horizon know how to swim... Never even seen the sea. I'm an idiot." She waited for the quip of, 'I'm glad you noticed', to come from her sister.

"Did you just call Titan Beta 'Horizon'?"

"Apparently..? Why?" Clara asked, debating if she should just pry Oswin's clasp from her elbows or just leave it and cart her unwillingly around a pirate ship all day.

"Only people who live there call it that, how'd you know?"

"Perhaps I listen to things you say sometimes! So you're scared of the giant salt factory?" Clara asked her. "If you've never even seen the sea then it's not really, like, I don't know. Pathetic."

"Says you, you grew up on the coast!"

"Well, yes, so I can swim. It's not like you_need_ to swim anywhere in reality, you can just fly places. And you won't fall in," said Clara.

"You don't know that, what if there's a storm?" Oswin challenged.

"Well you can come back inside if there's a storm, but I doubt they're going to trust you so close to their gunpowder reserves, so you should probably come with me," Clara said.

"You sound like you care."

"Didn't we have this conversation two days ago?" Clara asked, a puzzled expression coming over her.

"That was about _me_ caring. Not you, you were busy smoking," Oswin carped.

"Well if you come up on deck and come whaling then I won't smoke for the rest of the day," said Clara. It wasn't much of a sacrifice, but possibly it would be enough. Oswin still didn't move. "Oswin, I promise I will not let you fall into the sea and drown."

"If you do I'll come back and haunt you. Again," she said meekly. "What if they're after... I don't know, Free Willy?"

"...I think you mean Moby Dick," Clara corrected her. Maybe they'd just met some rather odd representation of Captain Ahab.

"Whatever, I don't know! That's dangerous! What about a kraken, hmm?"

"They're not real."

"You won't be saying that when... Bloody... Cthulhu comes out of the sea and tries to eat this whole ship!" Oswin continued arguing about various mythical sea creatures, but Clara god fed up when she started saying residents of Atlantis would be angry if they sailed over the lost city.

"We. Will. Be. Fine. Come on now, we're going to make sure pirates don't kill us now."

* * *

Clara decided very early on that whaling was easy. Probably because she was telekinetic, and her theory was correct. She could just steer the sealife towards the ship, though she did not particularly like watching them get killed, so she looked away as they hauled the creatures on board. Oswin was sitting down on the floor with her back to the wooden reinforcements on the side.

It turned out to be late afternoon when they 'arrived', and night drew in progressively quickly. Most of Clara's talking was directed at Oswin, though her sister rarely replied with proper words. Despite this, Clara did keep speaking until Oswin grew more and more conversational, and the topics easily came to a halt at Clara's echo.

"Maybe your echo is a dolphin?" Oswin suggested. Clara just shrugged, a secret part of her wishing her echo _was _a dolphin. The same part of her currently wishing she knew how to steer a frigate, and that she could breathe underwater. Phasing seemed rather a useless superpower in their current circumstances, although it would stop them getting shot, and having gills wouldn't do that.

"Don't you think you have a bit of an unfair advantage over these fish, honey?" Oswin asked a while later. Clara instantly turned to defend her actions, but found herself short of words.

"...They're not real," she mumbled, going back to staring out at the empty, teal scene ahead with the white flecks of foam riding the waves along to distant shores. But she couldn't see any shores.

"They could be real though," said Oswin.

"...But they're not. It's like writing a story. Nobody gets _hurt_ writing a story, the characters aren't really upset," said Clara.

"Well you seem pretty upset to me sometimes, Clars," said Oswin.

"I'm not a fictional character."

"Yes, honey, of _course_ you're not..." Clara ignored her patronising tone, nothing she was saying was making sense anyway.

"It's good to get a break though," Clara said, watching the sun clip the waterline in the distance. "It's actually refreshing, not having people breathe down your neck all time."

"Nobody trying to force you to do stuff you don't want do, hmm?" Oswin said, and so the subject of Adam Mitchell returned after his long absence.

"Wasn't my idea," said Clara firmly, "I was against it. But they just distracted me and went ahead with it anyway. As it goes, I have had minimal involvement. And most of my minimal involvement has actually been trying to help you."

"Not helping me do what I actually want and say I want, you're still out there playing matchmaker with the rest of them," accused Oswin.

"They were going to do it anyway! I tried to stop them, but they weren't listening-"

"You're the one who asked them to do it!"

"Not _that_!"

"You couldn't just speak to me?"

"I was wrong, I made a mistake, I'm sorry!" They'd gathered a scene with their bickering once again. Oswin wasn't even looking at Clara when she spoke, just glaring dead ahead. "I'll stay out of it from now on unless you bring me into it. And I'll try and keep them away, I don't know. I'll just leave it alone. You. I'll leave you alone."

There was a flash in the distance as Oswin started to speak, but she didn't say anything. Within a few seconds, a defeaning thunder clap sounded around them.

"STORM AHEAD! BRACE!" someone shouted. It appeared Clara's brief dip into whaling was over. She stared into the distance. There were no storm clouds no matter which direction she looked, apart from straight up, where a swirly grey mass was forming steadly. As she watched it, she saw another bolt of lightning crash through the heavens and strike the water, lighting it all up with rippling crackles.

"Clara, what do they mean, 'storm ahead'?" Oswin asked, her voice very nearly drowned out by the thunder, if Clara had not been listening for her.

"Means there's a storm," Clara said, "You know, with rain, and wind, and thunder and lightning!" Clara shouted over another thunderclap.

"Are we going to die?"

"What? No, Oswin, we aren't going to die." Clara was sure of that, at least. Telekinesis was a very useful ability to possess. She could make the entire ship fly if needs be, and she wouldn't need to use fairy dust to do it (for a brief moment Clara felt smug that she had one over on Tinkerbell).

"Well is the ship going to sink?" she asked. Clara said nothing as the ship rocked violently. It was entirely possible the ship would sink. "Clara..? Clara!? Is this ship gonna sink!?"

"I don't know, maybe!" And then a bolt of lightning struck straight down onto the main mast and set the sails and the deck alight. "...Yes, Oswin. I think it's going to sink." Oswin remained rigid, sitting on the floor in the foetal position. "I don't think this is a natural storm!" she shouted when the rain started like bullets on the wooden boards. Immedietely she decided abandoning ship was the best course of action.

"Maybe we should leave!?" Oswin yelled over the wind.

"Maybe you should stand up," Clara shouted back at her, but in the end they were both far too late to save themselves when lightning rained down from all around them, and it was a short matter of time before one of them struck the gunpowder kegs below. But there was not a doubt in Clara's mind that this was an attack.

"What's that music..?" Oswin asked. Clara frowned and the rain stopped suddenly, its rattles being replaced by singing.

"Someone's singing, who's singing?" Clara asked.

"Sirens."

"Oh, pull the other one."

"It's totally sirens."

"Well... Well first off what are they singing?" They both paused and listened out. Clara looked around, and saw the sailors and pirates seemingly entranced by the melody.

"It's classical music, from your century. Ugh. Twenty-first century classics are the worst," Oswin complained. Clara listened harder.

"That's... They're singing YMCA by The Village People!" she exclaimed. Why were sirens in the seventeenth century singing world-famous gay anthems to lure sailors to their deaths'?

"Yeah, classical music," said Oswin. "One of Earth's traditional ballads."

And then the boat blew up.

* * *

Clara did not particularly remember what had happened, but suddenly she was crawling onto a sandy white beach and coughing up gallons of sea water, dragging her sister with her out of the now placid, blue ocean. But she was soaked and cold after floating in deep sea for hours before land came into view. Oswin had passed out a long while ago.

She gasped for breath on the desert island she had found by following the supposed Siren-song, and could not care less that this was probably a very bad idea. Shaky-legged and exhausted, Clara left her sister in the shade of a tree, and resolved that building a fire was their best course of action.

Shoes squelching as she shuffled through the treeline looking for wood, she continued her hunt, wondering if her lighter still worked after its dip in the sea. She also wondered if the screwdriver still worked, too. Maybe she could sonic up a fire? Then she was wishing her superpowers were breathing underwater and pyrokinesis as she picked up lugs of driftwood and branches from the palm trees, slowly transporting them to her 'fire pit' and returning to comb the beach for more.

She sat down around her stack of twigs a while later and picked up rather a large log to serve as some sort of 'match'. Her lighter spluttered a few times, but amazingly still worked, so she went about lighting the fire twig by twig until it caught and the flames started, sending fire-fly-like cinders twirling into the night sky and joining with the stars in the blue above them.

There was an obvious beauty about the lazy island where they resided, the dark ocean mirroring the night sky, twinkles of corals and fish darting about among the rippling constellations being reflected by the starlight. This was long before the common human goal to escape your normal life to some kid of island paradise, but she admittedly saw the appeal. Although she much preferred these tiny, tropical islands in the past rather than laced with tourist attractions and over-priced consumerism.

Every now and then a crab would skuttle over the beach and in the tide getting washed back into the blue, distant leaves would rustle with creatures probably extinct in her time. She had never been to an island such as this, so luscious and peaceful, greens spliced with yellows and reds and little sneaks of brown in the treeline, exploration on her lips. She breathed in the familiar salt of the ocean and the unfamiliar, foreign fruits bleeding their juices into the trunks and the ground and sat forwards towards the fire, the only ugly mark of humanity there.

Craggy rocks peaked and dipped against the white wash of the moon above them, casting shadows onto canopies that were not long enough to creep towards the beach. She wondered who her echo was again. A shipwreck survivor? Dumped pirate? Perhaps a hermit? Somehow the wildest of guesses crept up to maybes in the strange mood of the land.

Clara thought her sister stirred on the opposite side of the fire and looked on concernedly.

"Clara," said Oswin, lying there with little motion other than breathing. Clara said nothing, merely watched expectantly for whatever she was going to say next. "You are my favourite lesbian."

"I don't know if that's a compliment or not," Clara said, rubbing her nose as it itched from the fire.

"That is the second time you've saved my life," said Oswin. "I'm cold." Clara patted the ground next to her blindly until she found her coat and held it out around the fire to Oswin, the drowned one. "I'm not taking your coat." Oswin pulled her own coat tighter around her shoulders after Clara had earlier draped it on her like a blanket.

"Why? You should warm up, it's chilly and you're soaked," Clara told her, waving the coat. "If I needed it I would be wearing it." Oswin begrudgingly took the coat and dropped it on her legs, curling up even more. "Feel better now?"

"...Yes," Oswin grumbled.

"I'll teach you to swim one day."

"You don't need to." Oswin didn't sound happy at all about this weakness in her character and usually flawless front. She was not nearly as much the image she put forward as the others seemed to think, the others going as far to include the Doctor, and even Adam Mitchell, who liked to thing he knew them perfectly.

"It'll be fun," said Clara.

"I'd rather not." Clara relented and retrieved the sonic screwdriver from the sandy bay, twirling it around in front of her and idly extending it, before pushing it back down with her palm and repeating. "You never speak about him."

"Hmm?" Clara looked up.

"The Doctor, you don't talk about him. You've barely said a word on him for... Four days is it now? Is this the fourth? I suppose. Not unless someone brings him up. You don't even talk about him much on the TARDIS," said Oswin.

"Wow. Anyone would think I wasn't completely in love with the man," Clara said, laughing sadly to herself, and watching the bulb on the end of the sonic as if awaiting it lighting up, like that would be some kind of sign. The golden band on her left hand glinted in the firelight.

"Anyone would."

"...Who's 'anyone'?" Clara asked, looking up finally. Oswin was lying stilly on her side, staring into the flames. She seemed to shrug.

"Why don't you want to talk about him?"

"Because I will miss him more than I do already if I let you coax me into a discussion," said Clara, looking back out to sea. In the back of her mind she wondered if her echo even was here, if the pattern was broken or they'd made a mistake and ended up stuck on an island for weeks.

"Amazing, you don't want to talk about your perfect husband."

"He's far from perfect. But at the same time he's the embodiement of perfect," Clara said, sighing in the cliché way they did in romance films.

"Honey, that doesn't make sense."

"He's totally dreamy, and completely adorable in like, every way. He's a genius, with a time machine that's bigger on the inside with endless stories and adventures, he's from another planet, and he is a genuinely good person. Well, he tries to be... I suppose occassionally it doesn't go too... um... Well... Oh, and he's tall."

"And he's great in bed."

"Exactly, he's - WAIT! NO!" Clara shouted when Oswin guffawed. "I didn't even say that, you have no proof." She continued laughing. "I can't believe you finally... Ugh..."

"I don't get it Clara, I am all of those things, but you're not head over heels for ME."

"No you're not."

"Well I'm a genius, totally dreamy and adorable, and I'm from another planet. Not to mentipn great in bed."

"And that warrants a cigarette, if you'll excuse me..." said Clara, staring around for the pack of cigs she promptly found out she didn't take out of her coat, making her defenceless in the barrage of unpleasant jokes. They were probably too soaked to light anyway, she told herself.

"Sorry, what?" Oswin asked in a serious tone. Clara realised Oswin didn't know the secret agreement regarding incest and fags.

"I, err... I didn't... Are you thirsty? Because I-"

"Don't change the subject. You smoke every time I make a joke!?"

"...Ha ha... No, Oswin, I..." Clara glimpsed Oswin's glower, and changed her route of persuasion, "Well only the creepy incest ones!" Oswin said nothing. "You can't even defend yourself."

"I'm going to sleep."

Clara decided she had won this one, and when Oswin closed her eyes she allowed herself a prideful smirk, giving the treeline yet another once-over, and then she curled up herself in her exhaustive dryness, finally getting a rest.

* * *

A second later, she opened stuck eyelids to see daylight cracking through her lashes, she squinted against it. Nothing marked her transition through the hours, and it took a moment of thought to notice she was the one in possession of the coat blanket and Oswin was not across the dim fire opposite, rather standing at some distance with a traceable path of crosshatched imprints in the sand leading to her heels. She stood firmly, one arm crossed over, holding a stick dug erectly into the ground, the other on her chin as she looked at something in the dust in front of her.

Sleep was not going to return, it had been and gone and now it was late morning and she was dry, her hair stiff with salt water and sand. She sat up and tried to mould it into respectability. Promptly she gave up, and got to her feet. Her legs weighed down by thin swellings from yesterday's exploits, she meandered over to her scarlet sister.

"Whatcha doing?" she asked in place of greeting, yawning painfully at Oswin's shoulder. Last night's smoking topic would not be revisited, she hoped. There was little to say anyway.

"Tallying," Oswin said, not lifting her gaze from the scratches below her. Clara expected an equation of ridiculous difficulty, spanning the length of the bay and back again, but all it was was a simple tally. 'C' scrawled on one column, 'O' on the other.

"Tallying what, exactly?" Clara stared around, eyeing up potential breakfast since Oswin apparently didn't have that sort of intuition. She spied a few cocunuts, which had milk and didn't need cooking. As long as they bashed them open with something

"Who's the nicest," she said.

"Why?"

"I'm bored and interested." Clara sighed in response to this, and didn't know what events Oswin counted in this venture, but decided to wander off towards the trees. "Water over there," Oswin pointed back to behind where Clara had slept. Clara frowned and saw two halves of a cocunut broken in half, buried strangely in the sand. She supposed this was a filtration device. Clara didn't know if Oswin was heavily distracted by her charting, or if she was angry at her. Clara ambled back over crookedly with the coconut shell of clean water.

"How do you choose who's the nicest?"

"Science, duh," Oswin said, and then she lifted up a fruit that looked like a mango from the ground.

"You have mangoes? I want a mango," Clara pouted, longing for food.

"Get your own mangoes, these are mine," Oswin glowered. Clara looked past her to see one more juicy looking blob nestled in a shady sand ditch.

"That's not very nice," said Clara. While Oswin busied herself with a glare, the mango floated up behind and around her and into Clara's hands without her seeing.

"I got water though, so that counts as a point," Oswin scratched a notch on her side.

"I saved your life yesterday," Clara said, scratching in the according point for that on her own, empty side with her finger, sand parting at her will, "And I built the fire, and I gave you both coats."

"Okay, but I gave you the coats back this morning," Oswin said, scratching another on her own side.

"Saved your life the day before as well," said Clara.

"And I ordered room service," Oswin said. Somehow those were equal.

"You saved me from Jack the Ripper," Clara said, and Oswin drew on another tally mark, "But _I_ bought us food that day. And I'm the one who got us the space heater when we were in that car." Clara had six and Oswin had four.

"And now we're back to the TARDIS," said Oswin, "Wedding dress, wedding ring, engagement ring." Three more tallies. "Nanogenes, Dalek Earth, mind patch-"

"You can't count the mind patch, the Doctor threatened you into getting it," she said darkly. Oswin muttered something incoherent and waited for another point to spring to mind.

"Space flu, Clint, telling everyone you weren't dead over Facebook," two more when space flu took the place of the mind patch. "When I came to save Past You and Rose?"

"Technically, we didn't need saving. And then we _did_ all permanently scar my subconscious with a ghost phobia."

"When you were drunk and me and husbandy had to take you back to your tent and look after you?" she scratched yet another mark in. "The itching powder prank to avenge your memory." Oswin now had fourteen in comparison with Clara's measly six.

"If we did a tally of who was the least nice you'd win that, too, though," Clara said grumpily, biting the mango. Oswin gave her a disgusted look.

"You stole my mango! You... Mango-whore! Also I gave you superpowers." Now she had nine more than Clara.

"I let you stay in my room that night the Tenth Doctor Zygon went mental," Clara said, finally clawing herself a point, "I got rid of the goat monster."

"Ghostly goat, Clara, that's what we called it."

"I apologise for not knowing the inner workings of your relationship with Creepy Adam. Speaking of that, I also got you four hours left alone in there. And I tried to stop them in the first place."

"Badly."

"I still tried! And I was the one who had to go out and cook for people, and I'm the one who stopped the pirates from killing us." Thirteen to Oswin's fifteen. They stared at the markings afore them. "What did that prove?"

"I'm not trying to prove anything, I was just curious," she said, and then she kicked up a tiny sandstorm and warped her tally into patchy obscurity and sighed, dropping her stick back onto the floor. "I'm hungry. For food other than mangoes."

"Catch a fish then," Clara suggested bluntly, assuming that the ocean was brimming with the creatures.

"No." Oswin walked off towards the smoky ash pile that had once upon a time been a fire. Clara remained.

"Why? Don't you like fish? I love fish. I could eat fish, like, for every meal, every day," Clara said, and then she heard a snicker, and turned to see Oswin trying not to laugh. "What? I don't... Why are you laughing?"

"Not laughing," she said. Clara thought back over her words, scanning each one for the double entendre Oswin thought she had found within, and then glared.

"It's not even funny, you're so immature," said Clara. "Such a dirty mind..." she grumbled. "We ate all the mangoes though, and I'm starving. There's nothing to eat except each other. Urgh."

"Well."

"I meant that in a purely cannibalistic way, Oswin!"

"Because _that's_ far better, isn't it?" Oswin questioned, unpertubed by Clara's rounding. Her husband would flinch and run away out of fear of what she would do (she didn't know what, exactly, he thought she was going to do). Lots of people seemed to be needlessly scared of Clara Oswald. "Even if you did catch a fish, you don't know how to cook one."

"Just put it on a stick and relight the fire," Clara said bluntly. In every book she'd read and every film she'd seen about castaways, they had not possessed the tools to properly gut fish or other kills, fillet them and pick the meat off. You ate what you could find and that was the end of that. It couldn't be _that_ hard.

"Enough about your desire to murder all sea life."

"You can cook crabs as well, just eat the meat out of the shell, like a plate," Clara said, "Shall I catch us a whale?"

"You mean beach us a whale and let it suffer." Clara paused too long to make a response before Oswin carried on. "Stop trying to slaughter aquatic mammals."

"Well where'd the flesh and milk from the coconuts go?" she changed the subject slightly. "You ate a whole coconut by yourself?" Clara marched over to the shells and tried not to stumble in her bare feet, looking around to try and find where she had left her boots.

"The weird white stuff? You eat that? Ew. I threw it in the sea," said Oswin.

"How you are even vaguely regarded as the smartest human who ever lived is beyond me..." Clara told her, changing her course to the footwear she'd just located. She threw herself down onto a patch of sparse, dry grass tufts near where beach turned to jungle, and tried to empty them of sand.

"What do we do now? Signal a ship?" Oswin asked, wandering over. She already had her shoes back on. Clara thought for a moment before saying what she'd been thinking since they washed up, but worded her opinions very carefully.

"...In America," she began slowly, "We found my echo when we stopped to get some food." Was all she said. Thankfully, Oswin understood what she meant and nodded thoughtfully in passive agreement. Clara thought the echo was on the island, and that was why they were there. "So shall we go look? Anything noteworthy you've spotted?" Clara jumped to her sore feet and hoped she would be allowed proper rest soon.

"Not really. I think there's a hill," Oswin said, glancing over to a small slate-coloured triangle peeking over the trees. They'd have a little bit of a view, Clara supposed.

The jungle was dense and they fought with taut vines stretched across their path and tried to be as quiet as possible - neither of them had experience with these forests. It was beautiful though, with bright birds and foliage relaxing on branches and peeking up out of the dirt. Soon enough, Clara phased herself and merely followed her sister as she broke a route through.

"Are you phasing!? And letting _me_ break everything down?" Oswin turned on her after not too long. Clara just smiled nervously in her poor defence. She then gave up and phased them both, dragging her sister by the hand through the trunks and the sharp thorns on either side.

The hill did offer them a good view, but they saw no fires, or tents, or belongings.

The island was a crescent shape, only more extreme in its curve, creating a large lagoon, and the edges of this lagoon appeared to be expertly decorated with seashells and flowers. There were rocks as well, worn down in places and looking like seats. They both stared at this curious place, and decided it should be their next aim to reach. If anything, it would serve as a wash basin, rather than having the muck of the sea clinging to them.

And so the traversing of the now less-dense jungle, trampling juvenile saplings underfoot and stumbling every now and then over nothing more than their own four feet, resumed.

Out of the brush they burst after possibly two hours of exploring, staggering to the smooth, grey platform around the lagoon. Clara reclaimed her hands and put them on her knees, panting when the humidity caught up with them and stuck to her skin and the inside of her throat. Everything was dry but everything was damp at the same time in the heat of what could only be noon, the sun beating ferociously above them now they were unprotected from it by the leafy canopy. Clara threw herself down backwards onto the ground rather than one of the chair rocks and spread her feet in front of her. She wriggled her toes, now feeling trapped by her shoes, feeling claustrophobic on behalf of her sweaty feet. Frankly, she was disgusting. They both were.

"What now?" Oswin asked. Clara seemed to be the defining word on what they did on the island. She stared around at the decorations. After going to so many alien places, she finally learnt not to touch. How curious Earth should be the place she learnt this.

"Don't touch anything," Clara told her, "I think someone lives here."

"Someone being who? There are no fires, no food, no anything, just this pool," Oswin said, looking around. Nevertheless, she heeded Clara's words and remained planted where she was as they waited. "What are we waiting for?"

"No idea," Clara said, pulling her legs away from the edge and crossing them underneath her, watching the clear blue water with a darker, navy patch in the middle. She stared at it with her brow furrowed. "It gets deeper, look." She pointed at the dark patch.

"So?"

"So that's weird," said Clara, standing up again and flinching when her feet pushed their swollen selves against the inside of her shoes. "It gets completely black right in the middle, it's like a tunnel."

"So it's some sort of underwater-dwelling creature who doesn't eat food and apparently doesn't cook or need shelter, and sits on rocks. Sounds like a mermaid, Clara," Oswin said sarcastically. She didn't even entertain the idea there might be mermaids. The myths had to come from somewhere, didn't they? "Clara..? Don't tell me you think there are mermaids. There are not any mermaids."

Just as she stated that with absolute fact and no room for doubt to wriggle in, laughter trilled from somewhere. Clara gave Oswin a look with a ghost of triumph there, but Oswin was watching the water.

And they dove out of the lagoon with splashes and laughs. There were possibly four, with shimmering, scaly fish tales and an awe inspiring beauty. With the blinding way the sun bounced from the scales which were somehow every single colour at once, the only were to describe them was dazzling. They looked like when oil collected in pools a made a rainbow spectrum by the roadside. Clara and Oswin stepped away. Suddenly they were all sitting on the edge of the lagoon with their tails flicking the water idly, and they had not seen the Oswalds.

"...Look on his face!" one of them continued a story they had been telling whilst they were still submerged.

"Don't lie, we all know you were looking at more'n his face," said a familiar voice. Clara and Oswin shared a look of partial dread and utter confusion. The other three mermaids chortled at this remark.

"I wasn't because Donna was there with me, an she got the 'best bit' first," said the first one. Clara wondered why she'd sounded so sarcastic on the words 'best bit'. And what, exactly, they were talking about.

"Oi!" said a second familiar voice as they turned and noticed a red-headed one facing the other way. She still laughed along with the others. "I wasn't even there."

"Nah, we'd know if you was," snorted the first one.

"Oh my stars, Donna Noble's a mermaid," exclaimed Oswin and Clara at the exact same time. Three of the mermaids, including Clara's echo, turned around.

"What else would I be?" Donna guffawed, but none of them laughed with her this time. Clara and Oswin both laughed quietly and terrifiedly as they were scrutinised. Then Donna turned around. "Bloody hell, Ara, she looks like you! They both do!"

"Ara?" asked Clara, confused. 'Ara' glared.

"It's short," she answered. Short for what, Clara didn't know. '_Short for 'Clara', honey,_' Oswin told her. Clara nodded once. "I haven't had a good meal in days, and now we have another lot of castaways."

"You had a good meal last night," Donna argued with her. "You had two good meals last night, actually."

"Eh?" Ara asked her, turning, puzzled.

"I was just talking to your girly this morning, is all," Donna said innocently but snidely at the same time.

"Private lives are meant to be bloody private..." Ara cursed, "I'll be having words." The lagoon bubbled a little every time one of them spoke sharply, tiny waves rippling their way out from their respective creator, the sun bouncing off their rainbow tails.

"Oh yeah, 'words'," Donna snickered. '_Your echo's a lesbian_.' 'Really? You think?' "Anyway. You did have food. There was a hunt, you were on it."

"Barely, it was a young hunt," complained Ara. There were sounds of pity from the other mermaids. "Had to let them eat first. Manners an all. Nearly bloody starved, nothing left. I'm hungry."

"Can't eat them, they look like you," said the first one again.

"As if you can tell, they all look the damn same," said Ara moodily. What, exactly, had they been hunting? All Clara knew is that when they spoke about food, it seemed to be a discussion about her and her sister.

"Honest, Ara," she said.

"Syl's right," agreed Donna, glancing at Oswin and Clara, "They ain't moving, either." Ara looked back at them.

"Who are they, Ara?" asked the only one who hadn't spoken yet. Every hair colour nearly was present in the small gathering. Donna the ginger full of mischief and wiles; Ara the brunette with cold eyes and a sullen expression; Syl the blonde with her hungry face and clawish hands; and finally the black-haired nameless one who completed their colour palette of a quartet, looking dreamy and distant. They looked like the embodiment of a hairdye advert.

"Going, that's who," Ara glared at them.

"No, we're here to help-" Clara said, and they all laughed shrilly.

"They was on that boat," Syl cut across them, "last night, I remember, but they got away on a bit of driftwood. Left them too it, Ara told me to."

"Oh really?" Donna asked, giving Ara an odd look. Ara said nothing. "Din't eat them last night but you'll eat them now? Ain't you full up on sailors?"

"They weren't no sailors, they were scum and there was hardly none of them," snarled Ara, turning feral for a moment. Donna glared at this, revealing sharp, pointed teeth. Clara's heart raced knowing they were at the disposal of a group of man-eating mermaids. "Hardly none first, then none left when the young'ns got them."

"Was a lot of young'ns," Syl agreed with Ara, who nodded and said, "See?", to Donna. Syl continued, "And you know they don't stop til they reach bone."

"If there were hardly none how come they were getting so many whales?" the dreamy raven-hair asked.

"Dunno. Whales are fine now though," Ara shrugged, "Left the sharks for the young ones. They eat owt."

"But what are we gonna do about the Aras?" Donna reasked. "Don't wanna eat them. Feed them to the young'ns?" Remarkable - they were discussing feeding Clara and Oswin to what she could only assume were the baby mermaids, right in front of them. The babies sounded even more vicious than the adults.

"Don't go calling them that," Ara ordered coldly.

"Call them what I like," Donna growled back. There was a pause.

"What's your names?" Syl asked. Clara was about to answer when Donna cut across.

"You ask their names you can't eat them, you know that," she said.

"Make your mind up! Friends or food!?" Ara demanded of her.

"Maybe Yms wants to eat them," Donna said, not rising to Ara's angry hiss this time, siting still with a look of confidence and valour. They both looked over to the black-haired girl, who was only half paying attention. "You wanna eat them?"

"Nah," Yms said distantly. No more words were spoken as they all looked back to the Oswalds expectantly.

"I'm Oswin," said Oswin.

"I'm Clara."

"Ha! Same name'n all, Ara," said Donna, "Ain't eating them."

"Shut up about eating them, maybe they can be helpful," said Syl when Ara was about to retort again.

"Here," said Yms, and they looked to her. It was strange how they were arguing and disagreeing, but doing it in a far more civilised manner than humans would. There was no shouting or talking over each other or slanderous name calling. "What about the magic conch?" There were sounds of yes's and other wordless noises of acknowledgement and understanding.

"Magic conch..?" Oswin asked slowly. They ignored her. She looked to Clara for an answer of any kind, but Clara gave her an empty, sorrowful look.

"Aye, the monch," grunted Ara.

"You ain't meant to call it that," Donna warned.

"It's a monch and I don't care."

"Feeds us," Donna defended the object, "Tells us where the ships are. You only found that'n last night because of all the whales dying, otherwise you'd of had nowt."

"We need it back anyway," said Yms, "After Bart took it."

"Who cares about Bart? Bart's dead, soon's he stepped in the water he was gone. We got him, and he hid the monch," said Ara, "Ain't these two gonna find it, ain't no-one gonna find it."

"Then we aren't gonna eat nothing," said Donna, "We need that conch back."

"Monch din't do nothing," she growled at Donna, "I aren't hanging around to hear your talk of it like it's a god, which it ain't." She snapped her tail impatiently in the water, crossed her arms and looked away.

"Din't hear you complaining about the magic conch when it was feeding us," Syl sassed.

"We rely on a shell for food, what's to come of us?" Ara argued after a long pause to think. "I aren't gonna worship the thing."

"Ain't no-one worships it," Donna told her firmly.

"Do too."

"Gives us food, you got to respect it, Ara. Calling it a... A you know, that's disrespectful. Don't see humans worshipping trees and dirt."

"We ain't humans and we shouldn't strive to be, an you sure? I've seen them worshipping the sky. I've seen them worshipping rocks and other rubbish they've pulled out of the sea. Hell, we prey on them and I seen them worshipping _us_. Shun't trust humans," Ara said darkly, shooting a glare towards the Oswalds.

"The conch works," said Syl, "finds us ships. Found Bart a ship. Soon's he tried to swim towards it we ate him, but it still worked."

"You ain't got no damn proof it ain't just coincidence," Ara snarled again. "These two're here for no good reason. What the hell, send them off to find your bloody monch, what do I care if you can't see sense?"

"It's magic, Ara," said Yms innocently.

"Magic my arse. Humans think _we're_ magic. I tell you, they're just 'landlubbers' and there ain't no such bloody thing as a 'magic-bloody-conch'!" Ara looked like she wanted to dive back into the lagoon and underwater, but she didn't, she just slid back in and swam to the other side, away from the group, to observe.

"Oi," Syl said to Oswin and Clara, "Go find our conch for us."

"What's it look like?" Oswin asked.

"Like a conch, obviously," Clara said to her in a 'duh' voice.

"Well what's a conch look like?" Oswin asked her. Clara ignored her.

"We'll find your conch," Clara said to them.

"You set foot in the water without bringing us it, we'll eat you, Aras or not," Syl threatened.

"Why d'you look like her?" Yms asked vacantly.

"Ask her yourself," Oswin said affrontedly. They all glared and bared their teeth, and Clara heard her sister make a noise that could be called a whimper. She then said they should leave, and Clara couldn't help but agree.

* * *

Clara threw herself back down onto the claimed sands of their own encampment next to the remains of the fire a good few hours later. She said nothing to Oswin, merely let her continue her streams of ravings about mermaids not being scientifically possible.

"It's like Spongebob," Clara said suddenly.

"I'm talking about Darwin, not children's shows," Oswin glared. She had her hologram screens up for the first time and was fruitlessly trying to connect to the internet. "Why isn't there wifi?"

"Wifi doesn't exist in the seventeeth century," Clara told her, giving up self control and freeing her feet of her boots. She tossed both lumps of brown over the beach now the sweltering heat of midday was over.

"What!? What about dial-up?"

"Oswin, no. Just give up with it," Clara sighed, taking a huge gulp from the coconut shell next to her. Well, she was about to, and then she shrieked and threw the coconut away from her. A shell-shocked crab rolled out of it into the sand and got up to skuttle away.

"Kill it, then we can eat it," Oswin told her, briefly getting a wild look about her. Clara floated it up telekinetically to keep it escaping.

"Kill it with what? Do you have anything sharp?" Clara asked. She had no idea how you hunted and killed crab, it was all alien to her (the irony). Oswin stumbled over in the sand, picked up the coconut shell, and bashed the crab in its belly. She paused to see if it was still moving, which is was, and then she bashed it again. She carried on bashing the crab until she was sure it was dead, at which point they both examined it and tried to figure out what to do next.

Clara sighed and stood up, leaving Oswin alone with their kill. She walked in the long grass for just a few minutes before she found a gang of hanging vines she had been looking for, a natural trap for the castaways and stranded sailors who seemed to frequent this island more than the mermaids. She tore them from where they hung and picked up another large, broken branch from the ground, then she returned.

She found Oswin in the midst of killing a second crab, and was thankful they had two sticks. She threw a vine at Oswin when her back was turned and had the pleasure of watching her scream indignantly that a snake was attacking her. By the time she realised what was happening Clara was in the middle of a laughing fit, trying desperately to tie the first crab to the end of the stick. A stack of cracked driftwood levitated itself over to them at this point, throwing its many parts onto their grey ash pile, waiting to be relit.

If Clara Oswald had known how to cook crabs at the beginning of this endeavour, she would have messed it up in every possible way. However, Clara Oswald had no idea how to cook a crab, and this turned out to be her greatest asset. She did not know how well it was cooked by the time it was what she deemed 'done', or what it was meant to taste like. She was just glad for food, and ate it rejoicingly. Her sister shared the same philosophy on crustacean-compiled meals.

"So this magic conch," Clara said, picking a bit of the tuna-looking crab meat out of the shell after she broke it apart with the coconut. "I was saying it's like Spongebob."

"Or Lord of the Flies," Oswin muttered.

"How do we find it?" Clara asked.

"If this pirate guy or whatever hid it, it can't be too far. Well it has to be somewhere mermaids can't get it. Or sirens. Whatever they are. I mean, they _were_ singing yesterday," Oswin said.

"Maybe it's in a tree? Seems the obvious place. They could probably drag themselves around on the ground," Clara suggested. It did seem quite blatant.

"There's a lot of trees though," Oswin said.

"...Yep," said Clara, "But it'd have to be somewhere he'd remember and somewhere hard to reach."

"It's in the tallest tree," Oswin said. Clara had only been moments behind this conclusion, but, she supposed, Oswin was the genius.

"How do we know which is the tallest?"

"If only one of us could fly..." Oswin said mockingly, stroking her chin as if she had a beard and looking at the sky. Clara said, "Mmm..." in wistful agreement, following her gaze up to a cloud she thought looked rather like a beer bottle.

"Clara!" Oswin snapped. Clara jumped, "...You can fly..? I was being sarcastic..?"

"...Oh! Oh yeah," Clara said stupidly. Oswin shook her head.

The afternoon dragged on slowly, and eventually the sun was creeping out of sight and the sky became a washed gradient of burnt orange and blue with a few scattered clouds. They just sat about, lazily admiring the scene in the knowledge that as soon as they retrieved the conch from the tallest point, they would move on to a new place. And really, it was a tropical island. Anyone else would take in the scenery.

Eventually Oswin suggested that they should go and find the shell, before it got dark, and Clara reservedly agreed. Oswin waited at the treeline as Clara floated up higher than she had ever needed to float.

"I envy you," wound its way through the air to her ears. She found Oswin looking downtrodden and looking between Clara and the treeline. It didn't take long for Clara to spot the tallest tree, it was about a metre above the rest. Sure enough, there was a little white glimmer in the dying light which she presumed was the magic conch.

"I'll just fly over and get it..?" she said, unsure if Oswin would object to this. She just shrugged and muttered something Clara didn't catch.

"Yeah," Oswin called up when she realised Clara had not heard her. Clara didn't ask if she was sure, and whizzed off.

She was wobbly and caught one of her ankles in the branches, stumbling in the air like a drunkard would if they could fly. She was little more than six metres up, but it was still further than she'd ever felt the need to float herself before and it was possibly one of the most wonderful, liberating things she'd ever experienced. The only sad thing was that she had nobody to share it with.

She easily retrieved the magic conch shell from where it rested in the leaves of the tallest tree on the moon island, and returned to Oswin with little dillydallying or hesitation. It was large and white with the opening running down one side, and a bulge where a creature once may have lived. Scarred to white by the sun from it's tenure in the treetop, it was no longer the pretty sight it once was, but it was flourished and grand still.

"Doesn't look magic," Oswin said. Clara shrugged.

"Ara said it wasn't. Who are we to judge? We just give it back to them," she said, pushing it into Oswin's hands and going to find her shoes again, forcing them back onto feet she was sure were swollen.

"You still haven't said anything about the Doctor, not since I asked," Oswin said. They were once again trekking through tight trees and plant life, only now it was nearly dark and Clara had to keep checking they were on the right path towards the lagoon. She tripped over a root when Oswin asked her.

"What do you want me to say? He's the love of my life and my husband and I miss him," Clara said simply.

"I don't know, something more interesting?" Oswin inquired.

"Why _are_ you so interested in my description of my other half?" Clara asked pointedly, treading over plants again and squinting ahead into the sticky gloom, attempting to discern how far they had left to go by a three feet circle by which she could see. Everything beyond was shrouded in impenetrable darkness.

"I'm just curious," she said firmly.

"I suspect Adam Mitchell."

"Adam Mitchell is not here."

"Neither is the Doctor. I expect he's out on the TARDIS fretting over me and repeatedly asking Rose if I'm dead. What if Rose can see us?" Clara asked suddenly.

"Then it's a bloody boring show she's watching," Oswin grunted, kicking a flower. _Bit rash_, Clara thought to herself, but they remained silent as they approached the lagoon, where the four mermaids still remained, Ara now returned to the group, telling more hearty tails of savagery.

"...Ain't thinking straight then, is she?" Syl was saying. Who they were talkig about, Clara did not know. They stood in the shadows with the 'monch' for a few moments.

"Can't blame her," said Ara.

"Can too, it's her own bloody fault if she falls for a tart," Donna said. "Both of them are as bad as each other. Never seen a pair of gals like them."

"What about you?"

"Me'n Fen ain't never been like that," Donna argued.

"Yeah right, I remember when she cheated with Syl," Ara snickered.

"Not true," said Syl, "I've never gone near your girly."

"Have. Everyone knows you're a flirt," said Ara.

"S'true," Yms agreed, looking as confused and detached as she had done during the day time. "Even been after Ara's Nia."

"Yeah alright, leave Nia out of this, she in't here," Ara said defensively, not happy now the tables had been turned.

"Neither's Fen or her sister or her sister's mate but we're talking about them," Syl piped up.

"We weren't talking about me and Fen," Donna said. "We were talking about my sisters-in-law." They all burst out laughing shrilly.

"_In-law_? You people now? With weddings and those larks?" Ara snickered.

"Shows commitment! Something you three wouldn't know anything about!" Donna shouted, trying to offend them, but Syl and Ara just laughed harder.

"Oh look," Yms said, pointing at Oswin and Clara. The other three looked round.

"Oh, here we go again with you monch-talk," Ara said.

"Bring it over then," Donna said, the closest ones. "We were hoping for a meal, but this is alright." Oswin edged forwards with the conch, holding it as far away from her as she could possibly get. Donna took it and Oswin scarpered away again. Donna slid into the water, and immedietely the conch lit up and started to glow when placed in the lagoon, lighting up all shades of blues, purples and greens like an aqua disco. And then it died down into a new conch, reinvigorated by the water, covered with moving patterns and pictures Clara couldn't see under the ripples.

"Here, what do you two think of marriage?" Ara asked. None of them seemed too interested in the magic conch now. The Oswalds were taken aback.

"I, erm..." Oswin said.

"I'm married," Clara said.

"What's she like then? Bad as your Nia?" Donna snorted, half her sentence directed at Ara.

"I admit she ain't perfect!"

"I'm married to a man," Clara said slowly. There was a moment of confusion among the mermaids.

"...Forgot humans had two genders," Ara said. "Men're only good for food and making more food and bringing us food. Down to them we don't have to eat sharks no more."

"Hope you and your man-friend have fun," snickered Syl. There was a silence. "Well? You leaving or what?"

"You expecting a reward? We din't kill you, that should be good enough," said Donna.

And then they scrambled away through the undergrowth and the thickets, and instantly collapsed onto the beach with a coat each this time and a warm, crackling fire.

"So, the mermaids sank the ship yesterday? That's why the storm was so weird?" Oswin spoke, cutting through Clara's lense of almost-sleep.

"Yep," was all she said.

"And they only found the ship because of the large amount of whales and sharks getting killed," Oswin continued.

"Looks that way." Oswin just sighed at Clara's neglect to admit it was her fault the ship was destroyed, although it was. Whose else could it possibly be?

"Hold on, were they _all_ lesbians!?"

"Isle of the Gay Mermaids," snorted Oswin, "That'll be why they were singing YMCA."

Clara shut her eyes again and allowed herself to drift away into slumber and peace, wishing the next day would bring soft furnishings, food and comfort.


	6. The Case Of The Death Valley Phantom

**AN: Well here is the longest chapter I have ever written, and it also contains the longest paragraph I have ever written, in this or 3D9CWCPGW?. I'm sure you'll know it when you see it.**

_The Case Of The Death Valley Phantom_

_Clara_

Heat was everywhere. Not like on the island, intermingled with moistness and the freshness of fruit and creatures, but dead and dry and stagnant. She woke up sweating, and was instantly faced with a spacious sea of oranges and reds as far as the eye could see, rocks and mountains breaking the horizon into craggy tears. There was nothing but dust and dead flies, which were plastered across the grubby window. She was in a car, leaning out of the window on one side. She blinked and breathed deeply, trying to claw cool air back from somewhere, but it didn't work and made her throat sting. Sitting back, her mind fooled her into thinking the temperature would change from exterior to interior, but it grew on mercilessly. She was in the drivers seat, a foggy bottle of water half-full lying sideways, lodged between the dashboard and the wheel. She took it and examined it, warm and grey.

"Ew," said a voice next to her. Her sister was eyeing the bottle of water from the passengar seat. She sighed and tossed into the back seat, where there were an assortment of washed-out, stale looking blankets and a case of beer. It was some sort of grizzly, English Range Rover - though they clearly weren't in any part of England Clara recognised. "We're in a desert."

"I'd never've guessed," she said sarcastically, wiping brown grime from the wing mirror and the one above her, repositioning it slightly. She looked around for keys.

"You can't drive this thing," Oswin said in disbelief.

"Why?" Clara said. If anything it would generate a kind of breeze, she was already sweltering.

"It's a deathtrap!"

"It's a car," she said flatly. Oswin glared when Clara finally found the keys jammed in the ingnition. The engine ticked over a few times and Oswin remarked it was going to blow up. Clara said it was a car, it was not going to blow up, it was fine, probably just needed fuel.

They strarted trundling along down a road just ten minutes after regaining consciousness with hardly anything said about their location or otherwise.

"It's far too hot," said Oswin, "On Horizon, it was always mild."

"Mild's boring," Clara shrugged.

"As opposed to heat stroke and pneumonia? I am glad that in reality I can't feel temperature," she said, "It _is_ funny watching you all get soaked in rain and mud."

"Oh, rain and mud..." Clara said, sighing out breath the same temperature as the air around them, if not hotter, so it blew back into her face and sent a wave of heat over her sticky hairline. She dragged her hair out of the way and wished for a bobble to appear somewhere, it would make it slightly more bearable. She would give anything to be in some viscous marshy field in the middle of a thunderstorm.

"Weather's weird," Oswin commented.

"Growing up in a weatherless cage at one temperature is weirder, it's boring. You had Christmas without the hope of snow? You had summer without the need for a fan?" Clara asked.

"We just didn't have seasons. You can't miss what you never had," she said, "And frankly, it doesn't look all that great." Oswin shrugged, and tried to wind down the window next to her, but the handle snapped off leaving a sliver of freedom in the top of the window above a line of dirt. "Those mermaids," she began a minute later, delving into the topic of the previous day.

"What about them?"

"They were from the North," Oswin said. "I mean, they had regional accents."

"_We_ have regional accents, what's your point? You're from Saturn but you sound like you're from Lancashire," said Clara.

"I'm from Titan, can't live on Saturn, too many asteriod crashes and dust storms, it's not good," she imparted.

"Well I'm sure the accent can't be too different," Clara shrugged. "I wonder why they did though, being from the middle of the Pacific and all. You're right though." And then Oswin brought up her holoscreens and made a start when it connected to the internet.

"Well at least we're not stuck in the desert in the fifteenth century," Clara grumbled. She couldn't care less what time period it was, it didn't help the fact they were on a singular, stretched and cracked road with paling markings and signs rusted to such a shade they blended into obscurity against the backdrop.

"Er, maps, Clars," Oswin said.

"...Oh right, yeah... Probably a good call," she said, feeling more than a shred of guilt and idiocy she had just shot down this idea.

"Yeah, well, I _am_ a genius," said Oswin, getting up what looked to be a complicated satellite program, and Clara was sure she saw a small, pixelated brand in one of the corners claiming it to be CIA operated. Of course Oswin Oswald couldn't use Google, she _had_ to hack into the Pentagon to discover their location. Obviously. "We are in... California. The Mojave. Somewhere. Sort of, en route to Arizona if you keep on this road for the next nineteen hours."

"I sort of hope we don't have to drive all the way to Arizona in this heat..." Clara growled, glaring at the puddle mirages on the tarmac ahead of her that made her eyes sting when she looked at the reflections. How she longed for non-stale water, or that it was legal to drink and drive, because then she would crack open the beers in the back.

"Bad idea, honey," said Oswin, adressing Clara's irrational ideas, "You may kill a man." Clara was tempted to shrug off murder nonchalantly, but instead remained with a steely expression fixed on the point where the road melted into the sky far in the distance. "Anyway, to get to Arizona, we have to stop in Vegas."

"Last time I went to Vegas I came back with a husband. Is that your aim, Winny? Get me drunk and marry me?" Clara sniped.

"Don't call me that," Oswin objected. Clara didn't tell her, but she was then searching the nearest parts of the car for cigarettes in case she needed to retort with them.

"How long until there's a petrol station, may I ask?"

"I think you'll find it's a gas station, dear, if you go across the pond," Oswin corrected blithely. Clara fake smiled with chafed eyes.

"I think you'll find I don't care," Clara said in a high, irriated voice. A fly drifted into the car through Clara's window (Clara peered down into the crack in the door, but could not find the window itself among the darkness, and resolved to decide the glass had been removed. In any case, her handle was jammed tight, which only served to further enhance the trustworthiness of this theory) and she swatted it straight back out again with the back of her hand and a stab of telekinesis, sending the dot hurtling behind them.

"And here we have the return of Clara's xenophobia," Oswin said in a documentarist voice that did nothing but prick Clara's nerves even more than the heat was doing.

"I'm not xenophobic," she told her with obvious malice in her undertones.

"Alright, racism," Oswin said as if the two were an interchangable duo like apples and pears, because there was very little difference between apples and pears in fairness. They were both occasionally green, and had seeds. Clara's hands momentarily tightened around the wheel, the pseudo leather hot below her skin. "You're in a bad mood."

"Yes I am. How keen-eyed of you to notice." Clara pushed the accelerator further into the floor and they trundled to an even higher speed of forty. Why the car would not exceed forty, she did not know, but it did little to cheer her up. No, what would cheer her up would be if they had the air-conditioning blazing with the windows both rolled down rocketing at eighty through the desert with a coolbox full of lemonade and lollies in the backseat rather than alcohol they couldn't drink.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"I can't help you if you don't speak to me," Oswin said in the most honest of voices. Clara was taken aback by her sincerity before pink clouded her vision again and steadily darkened.

"We wake up in a street in Victorian London after an ambiguous liquid gets thrown over me. We wake up in a street in the middle of the night in New York in a rainstorm. We wake up in a five-star hotel and get room service. We wake up in the gunpowder store cupboard of a doomed pirate ship. And now we wake up in a broken hunk of metal in the middle of the desert. Do you see the problem?" Clara said in an increasingly gruffer voice.

"I don't really see the problem with the hotel one," Oswin said quietly. She plainly sensed this was not the time for joking, but for some reason she joked about it anyway, and now Clara's eyesight was dangerously slipping towards crimson rather than rose.

"The problem is that not one of those places has been on the TARDIS with my husband, whom, even though apparently nobody can tell, I adore. That's the problem," Clara said. In the end it all boiled down to missing him, but it was now the fifth or so day of her isolation (she imagined the hours would add up to such a figure, rather than the six days it ended up as with their single night in similar locales sandwiched in the middle of their last exploit) and though she was trying not to let it get to her, she was now getting sore from it.

"Well it's been days, Clara," said Oswin, "I think it's totally normal to miss him, seeing as you've not actually had to go without him since you, you know-"

"Got married?" Clara said over her sister saying 'screwed'. Clara glared with the same fury as the sun above them, the thin alloy roof only preventing direct exposure to the death rays, but not the after effects of the heating up of the metal. A hole would burn through the top eventually, she was sure of it.

"Consummated." Oswin's amendment was hardly better than what she'd originally said and Clara was still busy wrestling with a blinding rage that were about to come over her at the next miniscule instance of provocation.

A shape appeared in the rearview mirror. Clara instantly dismissed it a fresh patch of grub emerging on the glass and tried to wipe it away with her thumb, keeping one eye on their slow traversing of America at forty miles an hour at the same time - making sure they didn't cut up a snail or something. But it was not a fresh patch of grub, she was as mistaken as she possibly could have been. It was a Recreational Vehicle, and it was coming up on their right at the speed Clara would like to be going at, but wasn't.

It continued on at its high speed, coming into more and more focus behind the god-awful Range Rover they were lumped in. There was not room on the road for it to pass, Clara soon noticed. Either the RV slowed down to a near-crawl and just followed them until they found anywhere to stop and replenish their supplies of _everything_, or there was going to be an incident.

It honked indignantly behind them, a Union Flag hanging with big filth stains splotched over it billowing underneath the cab, along with very peculiar bumper stickers which seemed to be made up of slang terms and swears Clara recognised but the typical American probably wouldn't. However, remotely mature was exactly what the bumper stickers weren't. She could have sworn to glimpse a nodding Churchill on the dashboard of the abomination coming up, and wagered even worse patriotism was plastered along the sides.

"That RV is calling me a Bollocks Wanker Twat Knob, and frankly I'm offended," Oswin said, fully turned in her seat to frown at the thing, reading off the slurs on the stickers. "_Limeys and proud_?" She read off another.

"Slightly pathetic," Clara shrugged, glaring into the mirror. She couldn't even see the driver, the thing was that dirty and offensive. The driver, whomever they were, carried on honking. "Are we not known for politeness and not obnxiousness?"

"Who?"

"The English."

"Technically speaking, I am not English, I am from Horizon. I'm having nothing to do with the matter, I'll just take the outsiders view," Oswin said.

"Good for you and your self-righteousness," said Clara when they honked yet again. It was only a matter of time before whatever arse was in the RV popped their head out of the side and bellowed some offensive slander referring to Americans out of it, although she was sure it would be something they assumed nobody could understand (which completely lost the point of the insult), something not all that offensive, or something that would get them shot if they yelled at the wrong kind of person.

"BLOODY REDNECKS!" came the catcall and Clara floored it and veered them into the middle of the road. More honks, but far more violent in their nature now.

"They're worse than you, Clars," Oswin said, giving the RV a perplexed look out of their back window. "_Oh they live in a place where it's easy to get sunburnt let's make fun of them_." She imitated in a prissy Southern English accent most unlike either of theirs. Clara laughed, but it was short lived. One more long, drawn out honk made Clara stick her hand out of the window and flash twos at them. Then someone stuck their head out.

"OI, GET OUT OF THE BLOODY ROAD YOU HICKS!" they shouted in a familiar voice. Not familiar as in Clara's echo, but familiar from somewhere Clara could not place. Oswin's eyes widened next to her and she dragged off her seatbelt to completely kneel and squint out of the back.

"What? Who is it?" Clara asked, sparing glances back and forth. Oswin said nothing, and the RV propelled itself forward. "Oswin, you should sit down."

The RV was floating as precariously close to the right of the road it could possibly be, clearly eyeing up the gap half its size between the Range Rover and the dry lake on either side of them.

"Seriously, Oswin, don't make me stop this car," said Clara, adopting the voice she used to make Angie and Artie listen to whatever she was saying and using it in all its power on her sister. But her sister didn't hear her. "Oswin, sit the hell down!" Still Oswin was disconnected from everything except the RV.

"_OSWIN_!" Clara yelled at the same time the RV pulled up top speed and swerved around them, an impossible manoeuvre which proved to be exactly that when one of the back wheels clipped something. It started to spin around, the back hurtling towards them. Clara turned to the left in a panic and sped towards the flats of orange and safety. But the car was too slow. The RV tail smashed into the back of the Rover and sent them spinning out in some other direction, and there was an almighty crash and they hit a bump before Clara's seat belt saved her and Clara's telekinesis saved her sister, the apparent 'genius' when they halted in a dust cloud, Clara coughing and her chest stinging from the seatbelt.

"Are you okay!?" she asked her sister, cocern coming before anger. She surprised herself with this. Oswin was remaining in her state of shock. "Oswin if you do not answer me right-"

"Fine," Oswin said suddenly in a sharp but unreadable voice. Clara tested the accelerator, but there was nothing coming from it. They were completely broken down.

"No, what was that? Who was in the RV? Who did you recognise?" Clara asked. Oswin did nothing except use the dashboard to push herself back into her seat from where she had remained in suspended stasis, courtesy of Clara. She fought with the door for a moment or two before kicking it open and it swung around and fell of its hinges. Oswin ran off and Clara stared at the door with shock before realising that she was gone, and she scrabbled after her.

The RV was flat on its side, half on the road and half in the toffee-coloured dry lake, the door facing down with about a two-foot gap in the drop where the lake emerged, the road lifted up and running through like a snake. Oswin was watching when Clara appeared at her side.

"Who did you know?" Clara asked her again. What possible person could have that sort of effect on Oswin? Jesus? But no. The answer crept into her mind the moment she thought about it for more than two seconds: Adam Mitchell. Adam Mitchell had been the racist driver of the RV, and it was Adam Mitchell's legs which appeared dangling out of the doorway first. Oswin shifted uncomfortably, now remembering this Adam Mitchell was a warped version of reality spawned by their collective opinions of the boy, and not the one doting on her. "Not the same person. You of all people should know that."

"I don't need reminding," Oswin said bitterly. Clara's fury and road rage had ebbed away with this distraction, and now she had to look after her sister again. Because it appeared they were stuck in the desert.

Adam Mitchell ducked under the RV and stepped out, coughing and glaring and on the war-path. It was a shame he was so unintimiading it was laughable. Clara wouldn't be able to keep a straight face if he ever tried to shout at her, though in reality the only thing keeping her from dangling him in the air by his ankle using her brain was the fact her sister may not be too grateful. He stormed towards them until he actually got a good look at them, at which point he stopped dead in his tracks and gawped.

"Rude, much?" Clara asked, giving him a dirty look. He didn't appreciate that one bit. And that was when two pairs of legs dropped down from the bus, making four legs. Four furry legs all connected to one creature, that creature being a dog Clara recognised as a border collie. "Oswin I nearly killed a dog!" she exclaimed, pointing at it. When two more human legs dropped down through the oblong trapdoor, the dog stopped and stared at them both before padding over and smelling at their feet and lower legs. This just confused it even more. Surely Clara and her echoes didn't _smell_ the same, too?

"Whoa," said a voice of someone familiar who wasn't Adam Mitchell. No, this WAS Clara's echo, and she had never been more glad for her echo's emergence than right there. Hopefully at least one of her echoes would turn out to be pleasant, after the last one happened to be a gay, ill-tempered, regional-accented, man-eating mermaid.

"Hi," said Clara. The echo looked for a long few monents between them before coming to a conclusion of some sort.

"Hold on a moment," the echo said, and then she kneed Adam Mitchell in the groin and he was on his hands on the ground and a pair of thick-framed glasses slipping from his face and landing face down in the dust. Clara watched him. Oswin winced and looked away, avoiding the sight.

"Wow. I wish I'd done that," Clara said dully. And then she smiled at this echo, who she was already beginning to like. Another two people had emerged from the car by this point.

"You're... English?" Adam Mitchell coughed from below.

"And you're a racist," Clara said. In the midst of passive rage, the US and the desert isolation the desire so spit on him arose within her, but she didn't in the end. She didn't approve of spitting, and she had spent a year frivolously trying to stop Artie Maitland from picking up the habit to no avail.

"Damn, Cara, what's going on?" a tall boy asked. He was a boy, rather than a man, because Clara was sure they were all students. The echo certainly had that look about her. Students on a gap year, that was the explanation she sought, which also answered for their immaturity.

"Not sure yet," the echo said, "Either of you gonna explain?"

"Yes," said Oswin, trying to hide the fact the existence of Adam Mitchell in curious post-teen form, curled up in the gravelly red ground of California, was making her edgy and anxious. "I'm Oswin, and this is Clara, with an 'L' there, just to be clear. She's my bae."

"Please stop introducing me as that," Clara requested boredly.

"I will when it stops being true," Oswin said. Clara shook her head and put her hands over her face for a moment, then commenced with wiping it free of fresh sweat and a new layer of dust.

"Yeah, whatever... This is Oswin, she's a genius. And also amazing and charismatic and attractive and whatever other adjectives she likes to use," Clara said boredly, wanting to sit down.

"Wow," said the boy again. Four teenagers. Driving around America in a bus. With a dog. 'Oswin. We are in Scooby-Doo.' '_Clara, that is ridiculous._'

"Clars, I'm... I'm tearing up here, you called me attractive," Oswin said, fanning her face over-dramatically and scrunching it up into creases. Clara leant away a little and judged this from a distance.

"Well you're certainly not anymore," she ruled. Oswin instantly flicked back to a glare and then turned away, blanking Clara momentarily. Until she got bored.

"Um, I have a question?" The same boy asked. "Why do you both look like Cara?"

"Because we do. Obviously. Why are you so nosy? Hmm?" Clara questioned, and he just frowned with his pinkish eyes and made a groaning noise. He was high. Excellent...

"I'm a little interested in that too," Cara herself said.

"It's a pretty wild story," said Oswin knowingly.

"Yeah, we'd tell you, but-"

"We just don't have time right now."

"...Have to prepare for it..."

"...Props and..."

"Lights..." They were both nodding now, sounding so assured they even believed themselves that they were going to have to scavenge a cast of actors from desert caves and an entire lighting rig to tell the story of How Cara Came To Be.

"We're relatives though," Clara said. "And you ran us off the road and now our Range Rover is broken." They looked at her like she didn't have her priorities in order.

Adam Mitchell tried to stand up.

"Stay on the floor, Itchy Mitchy," said the other boy darkly. Nobody spoke out against this and Adam Mitchell sat back. "This is your fault."

"And who was _meant_ to be driving but couldn't because he was hungover?" Cara questioned him coldly. He said nothing. Adam Mitchell remained on the floor and Oswin remained uneasy and there was silence as Clara presumed somebody would eventually ask for insurance details they didn't actually have.

"It's kinda their fault," said the second girl, who had not yet spoken, holding an accusatory gaze across the Oswalds.

"He tried to cut past us!" Clara protested, "And now we've both broken down."

"We broke down?" Oswin asked.

"If you'd been paying attention you would know that. Yes, the car won't start."

"Why?"

"I don't know, maybe _you_ should look at!?" Oswin just nodded and shuffled again. Clara could feel her bad mood resurfacing after a momentary subsidence brought on by little more than adrenaline and annoyance at 'Itchy Mitchy' (God forbid she ever find out why they call him that, she wasn't sure she wanted to know). "The point is if he hadn't been such a xenophobe, we would've let you pass."

"There wasn't room on the road to pass," Adam Mitchell grumbled from the ground.

"Then why'd you try?" Clara said in a voice brimming with fury and threat, standing over him. He said nothing in defence. Too proud to admit he was a complete idiot. This from a 'boy genius'.

"I think the main problem is that we're stuck here, in Death Valley, and it's almost nightfall," Cara spoke up eventually. They all stared around the desolate wastes surrounding them, rustic and barren for hundreds of miles in every direction. Not even a vantage point, aside from a distant mountain. "And we don't have a satellite phone." They thought for a while, but then the RV behind them started hissing loudly and a cone of smoke twirled up from the side of the bonnet. The gap year-ists all ran off, although their collie only went half a way closer and paced and yowled at the sight. Clara began to back off, sensing something bad.

"Oswin, we could help them," Clara said, "Sonic a phone or whatever. We didn't even search our car yet."

"Or teach them a lesson..." said Oswin slyly, glaring at the truck. Clara scoffed indignantly, and then hooked Oswin's elbow and forcibly pulled her away from the RV. Perhaps the smoke would alert someone who could help them, though it seemed unlikely. "Echo's right though. We're in the middle of Death Valley and it's nearly night."

"But it's so hot..." whined Clara.

"I'm sorry, I'll just speak to sun and tell it my sister thinks it's too hot to be the evening," she said, keeping a steady gaze on the Recreational Vehicle out of the side of her peripheral vision. "That's gonna go. As in explode. In... About..." She frowned, doing some complicated mental calculations, probably to remind Clara she really was a genius. "Eighty-eight seconds."

"Exactly?"

"No, 88.4658292-" Oswin said, doing the same involuntarily innocent expression she always did when she was doing something clever. If Clara didn't know her, she'd've described it as modesty.

"Yeah, yeah... Maybe you should tell them?" Clara said, but there was no need when, after dragging out what looked like blankets and some large quantities of food by the armful, they were all back out of the RV. "GET AWAY FROM THERE!" Clara yelled. It seemed that by this point, the worry of a huge house-bus exploding was little more than a usual day. Well, so far there had been no serial killers or mythical beasts, so compared to the others it was almost tame. In fact it _was_ tame. Very tame. After all, what lurked in US deserts at night?

Clara and Oswin ducked behind their Range Rover just as the RV was blown to smithereens, scattering debris into the sand around them as the ground shook. Clara peeked over just as a rod flew straight for her. Had she not utilised intangibility at that moment, she would have died, her brain impaled. She turned around and followed the shrapnel's decent ten metres away from her and over twenty away from the source. It skidded to a halt, leaving a snaking path in the sand, and then the echo of the explosion died down to a rumble of flame. She heard the hiss of fire extinguishers from somewhere and stood up to examine the scene, Oswin cautious but right behind her.

"Wow," said her sister. "We missed it." Her expression sank.

"Don't worry, when we get back to the TARDIS we can come blow stuff up in the desert," Clara promised. A grin flickered momentarily among the shock on Oswin's face, exactly level with Clara's right then (rather than a few inches lower when Clara wore heels regularly).

"Totally holding you to that," said Oswin, and then she slunk away towards the boot of their car. Despite the fact it no longer worked, at least it was mainly intact. In any case, Clara was sure her sister could do something to fix it with all the debris. Possibly a rock, or a handful of dust. "Think fast!" she said.

Clara had known Oswin Oswald long enough at this point to know that when Oswin said_think fast_, she was likely about to throw something deadly and heavy. Already, in little more than a month, she had been subjected to tennis balls, rounders balls and fists galore, and Adam Mitchell to a particularly large hunk of metal she'd lobbed at him one fateful morning when he offered to help her carry something. At these tremulous words, Clara whirled around and phased again when a long, thin, golden-silver object sailed through her skull. The second time in less than two minutes that this had happened.

Her husband's sonic screwdriver lay in a bed of dust behind her and Oswin gave her a disapproving look.

"Shame on you," she said, "You'd've thought you'd've learnt by now."

"Yeah. Learnt that you are mental," Clara said, the sonic floating up into her hand. She flicked it out and checked it still worked, sending it into a frenzy of emerald flashes and buzzes. But she deemed it okay. And then she gave it to her sister to deem okay, which she did after a second or two.

"Tents."

"What?" Clara asked, distracted again by the rememberance she was married (it happened a lot).

"Well, tent. Just one," Oswin said, picking up a heavy-looking synthetic bag and holding it out for Clara to see. "Like to see that keep the cold out, looks flimsy as..." she frowned at it.

"Cold..?"

"Yes, honey, cold. Do you need me to explain why deserts are cold at night?" Oswin asked patronisingly. Clara was about to say no, she couldn't care less, but Oswin was already going on about lack of clouds and hot air escaping.

"Hot air's escaping from you right now, is that the same thing?" Clara asked, and then her face lit up when she peered in the boot and found cigarettes finally, and her lighter. Both of them were now staples on her person. Somebody cleared their throat loudly behind them both. The Oswalds turned around, both unaware they were being cross-examined by a group if hungover, xenophobic students on their gap year. Cara was the source of the cough.

"Well?" Cara asked. The RV was a smoky mess behind them, and it didn't smell too grand, either. Clara turned her nose up at tit.

"Well what?"

"Okay. I don't care who you are or why you look like me," Cara was now pacing and talking with her hands in a manner not dissimilar to Oswin when she was worked up. "But that RV is hired in _my_ name with _my_ papers, and I can't pay for this!"

"Make Adam pay for it," said Oswin, "It's his fault." They gave her confused looks.

"How'd you know he's called Adam? None of us mentioned it," Cara asked. Oswin laughed anxiously.

"She's a genius," supplied Clara on her behalf.

"If she's such a 'genius', can she tell us what to do next?" the boy asked. There was a pause.

"Look around," was all Oswin said, shrugging. "Set up, erm, camp? Build a fire?" Cara then did a long, exagerated, full spin, staring out into the desert.

"With what?" she asked. The other three sniggered at this, as if somehow this was Oswin's fault, which it wasn't. She hadn't even been driving.

"We don't owe you anything," Clara said, "We don't have any insurance papers or anywhere for you to charge us for this anyway. Stolen car."

"First whaling and now robbery, where to next..." Oswin chriped.

"It's you, you're a bad influence," Clara said, "Anyway. If there's one thing I've learnt from being a time tra... A criminal, it's that you should always look around everywhere." Oswin nodded along with this, and that was the moment Clara lit a cigarette and started smoke, much to her sister's discomfort.

"I blame your husband," Oswin said to her. Neither her sister nor her husband smoked, it was a bad trait she picked up entirely from her father in her late teens and briefly stopped so as to nanny the Maitlands. Clara ignored her remark, and stood there, arms crossed and all her weight on one leg, as if challenging them to question what she said. Nobody did. Maybe it was because she had no confidently declared herself a criminal.

"We're going to look for wood and people now," Clara stated suddenly. Oswin didn't seem bothered by Clara commanding an authority she was only pretending to have, just stood by like a loyal lieutenant awaiting orders. Not that Clara was going to order her around, she'd probably become the victim of more projectile attacks if she so much as thought about it.

"Are they not normally the same thing?" Oswin made the joke Clara had been half hoping she wouldn't make and half hoping she would.

"Anyone care to come with us? Or are you just gonna wait here and starve for days?"

"I'll come," Cara said, "So'll Wolfy." She indicated the border collie obediently at her side. They were still not granted the luxury of introductions to this group of university students who apparently thought they were better than everyone else.

After Oswin had searched their car for anything dangerous or potentially paradoxical and removed it, they set off walking in the direction she had pointed them in. Not a word was said until they were far, far from the camp and definitely out of earshot, for that was when Cara excitedly began questioning them. Before Clara knew what was happening she'd already been accused of being a robot spy modelled off Cara.

"Maybe you're a robot spy modelled off _us_," Oswin proposed, and without realising what she was doing a holoscreen shimmered up from nowehere with her satellite system on it, and it zoomed in on their locale until it was a floating rectangle of orange. Cara looked like she was about to shriek.

"Great going, Oswin," Clara said defeatedly, "Now we probably have to tell her everything instead of making up some lie." Her echo was plainly a conspiracy nut, that was clear after just minutes of speaking to her away from the rest of her party and her destroyed rented vehicle. The thrill of potential clones had made her forget about all of this.

"Whoops..." she said. The screen vanished and she held her hands behind her back. "I'm not a robot."

"Are you... Are you like, visitors? From outer-space?" Cara asked in awe. And then she stared upwards into the stratosphere. Clara followed her gaze, though she didn't know what she were expecting to see. A blue police box, maybe.

"No, but my husband is," Clara said vacantly. "Oswin is a little. Aren't you?"

"No."

"You're visiting and you're from outer-space," Clara told her.

"Yeah, but I'm not an alien." Clara thought about saying she was technically a Dalek, and decided against it. Just a few days ago she knew she would not have hesitated to making a quip about her sister having her brain put in a genocidal killing machine full of hate. "Are you going to tell her the full-story or what?"

"Okay. Okay, fine. Just so you know, Cara, you're the first one apart from Oswin to, like, know," Clara said. Once again bitterness stemming from her sister and their emotional link washed over her at being grouped together with the rest of the echoes. Clara would have to smooth that out later, as she commenced her story. "A year ago... Er, roughly... This man showed up on my doorstep called the Doctor..." Cara was listening intently already. Clara carried on speaking, leaving large chunks of adventure out of the story and skipping straight from the wifi to Trenzalore and the echoes, and then lightly touching upon their marriage and a little about Oswin (who was pretending to be busy). Cara seemed awestruck by the whole recital (Clara left out the parts involving the prank war and the coma and the fact this was likely all a hallucination).

Night had fallen. There was a large contrast between the blacks and blues of the sky and the dark dirt colours of the desert below it. Stars twinkled, little light pollution out so far into nowhere to blind them from sight. Cold wrapped around them like a blanket, but at least they were no longer sweating. Clara had already drained the single bottle of water they had been 'allowed' by the students (this was actually in exchange for their case of beer (Oswin had been the benefactor of that deal, Clara had not wanted to relinquish the beer, but had been guilt tripped by a callously offhanded remark about her smoking habit)), and was in desperate need of some more hydration. She pulled on her coat, which Oswin had instructed her to bring like a bossy, older sibling, and stuck her hands in her pockets with her arms down by her sides as they walked further. Cara was making her own entertainment by quizzing Clara on her knowledge of the Doctor.

"What's his favourite fruit?" she asked. Even Oswin, normally all-for people awkwardly questioning Clara about her marriage and her private life, was getting bored by this point.

"Bananas. Or strawberries," Clara said, puzzling over her memories of what was now almost a week ago. If time had sped up miraculously inside her mind and time in the real world was at an almost-standstill by comparison, the memories were just that morning. Just hours prior to when her delerium had begun.

"Strawberries?" Oswin asked. Of course, she actually knew the man and his obsession with bananas and his hatred of pears and his mixed feelings about apples.

"I don't know. The other morning he said I smelt like strawberries," Clara told Oswin. A snippet she was hard done by to get. "Actually, he told me I smet of strawberry laces, specifically. And candyfloss. And tea." She smiled at the memory, sadness coming over her.

"What did you tell him _he_ smelt like?" Oswin asked, "I would smell him myself, but, you know. I'm a dead hologram."

"He smelt like coconuts because he steals my shampoo," Clara said.

"What's his favourite colour?" Cara asked. Oswin groaned, and went ignored again.

"What? Blue..." said Clara.

"What's his favourite time period?" Clara had absolutely no idea what the Eleventh Doctor's favourite time period was. He frequented Victorian England a lot, but whether that was by personal infatuation or because of the presence of the Paternosters to aid him, she did not know.

"1989, probably," Oswin snickered, Clara's birth year.

"Okay, he's not... Perhaps, yes, maybe he's a little stalker-y, I have had words with him about this. We do actually speak to each other, you know," Clara said.

"You do, do you? I thought you just kinda..." Oswin went on to do a juvenile phallic mime with her fingers and Clara slapped her hands away. She snickered like a ten year old who had just been subjected to their first sex ed lesson.

"When's his birthday?" Cara asked next. This was the final question she was going to ask, Clara decided, because her sister burst out laughing.

"He... Well I don't know! He's a bloody... 1200 year old alien for christ's sake! I don't know the months and days of the years on Gallifrey," Clara said angrily.

"What's-"

"Enough, Cara. I'm not going to carry on answering questions about my husband," Clara said.

"He sounds sweet though," she said.

"Clara said he's great in bed yesterday."

"I said no such thing."

"Yes she did, and the day before she said she couldn't remember the first time she shagged him because she was drunk," Oswin said.

"Be quiet," Clara said, "Or maybe I'll start talking about Creepy A-"

"There's no need for that," Oswin said sharply, demeanour falling into coldness and warning for a moment, along with a tangent of fear. Clara gave her a smug look when Cara wasn't looking, lest she get involved in their competing.

"Yes, he's sweet," Clara said eventually. Apparently it got the annoying questioning of a teenager to get Clara to actually speak about her feelings and opinions of the Doctor to someone other than him.

"What's the sweetest thing he ever did?" Cara asked. Clara decided that she would answer this one, if only to spite Oswin and her green envy. But then she realised it was a question involving some thought. The time he brought her back from the dead was not what she would describe as 'sweet' (given her own choice of words, she would describe it as 'desperately passionate'). She retraced the recent stages of her life.

"What about the time he went to your mother's funeral and skulked in the back when you were seventeen?" Oswin asked.

"There was the time he called you my evil twin," Clara said.

"I'm hurt and wounded," Oswin said. "What's the sweetest thing _I've_ ever done, then? Hmm? If I'm so evil?"

"...Well no, that's not fair because you do sweet things," Clara argued. Oswin smirked then, but there was definitely a hint of swelling pride along with it.

The conversation had to come to an end at that moment when there was a howl. Less than a howl, a screech, a cross between a cry of pain from a dog and a dying song of a hawk, rasped and final, coming from one source. Wolfy, the collie, who had been padding quietly alongside them and occasionally getting a drink from a spare bottle of water Cara had, stood up with one paw out, head down, ears high, tail straight. Frozen. Clara stared around, looking for the source of this animalistic scream ripping through the desert silence. It was gone without a trace in an instant, leaving them alone once more.

The four of them were standing at the edge of a hill going down a long slope into a vast valley before it rose up again miles in the distance and returned to the level they had been walking at. Planted firmly in the middle of this valley and close enough to the foot of the outcrop on which they were stood to access was a ranch. Oswin skidded down the slope without a word and headed towards it, Clara, Cara and Wolfy quick to follow in her tracks.

This ranch soon turned out to be deserted. It didn't look old or unkempt, but there was an empty spot where a car should be and no longer was. And then there were the bodies. Ten, possibly twenty or more, dead animals. Dead goats, sheep, cows, horses. Everything that had once thrived there was lying partially rotted with flies milling around and buzzards on high. Oswin was standing on the lower rung of the fence, not daring to set foot on the property, but leaning forward so as to get a better look at the corpses. Clara wore a sombre expression as she came up behind her and remained back. It had already been proven Oswin had the stronger stomach for such scenes.

"Oh my god..." Cara said. Oswin and Clara exchanged a look meaning _why doesn't this one say stars?_, but then resolved with a second look to speak about it later. Oswin vaulted over the fence (unnecessarily) and landed in the yard of the place, approaching the first animal, a goat, with a look of malice and superiority.

"Enough with the goats," Clara whinged.

"I don't like goats," said Oswin.

"I know, but these ones are dead, and they are not going to become... 'ghostly goats' or whatever you called them," Clara said.

"They'd better not," she said in a voice like death, kneeling down and carefully examing the goat. Clara, from her distant perch, could see a darker patch below the necks of the animals spreading into the dirt and dust, but unmistakeable for a dried pool of blood.

"What's with their necks?" Clara asked.

Oswin was about to speak, when Cara cut over her with a glazed look of fear, "It's the Chupacabra." Clara gave her a dumbfounded look. Cara the conspiracy nut was the oddest echo so far. And she was up against Victorian prostitutes, death-faking mobsters, scandalous TV personalities and lesbian mermaids.

"It's a what-now?" Oswin asked.

"A blood-sucking monster that comes out at night and drains animals dry of blood," Cara said, something fierce coming over her and leaving her ecstatic by the discovery of some dead sheep. Clara was none to pleased with the news of a blood-sucking monster only coming out at night, however. They had mermaids. Why not chupacabras? She remembered the yowl they had heard. "It's favourite food is goats blood."

"Well that's not so much a food, is it? More of a moderately heated beverage," Oswin said, but she was clearly nervous.

"Oswin. This is a very important question," Clara said seriously, "Have you been living in the Mojave and killing goats at night?"

"For the last twenty years," Cara added 'helpfully'.

"Yes Clara. You got me. I, Oswin Oswald, am the Chupacabra. Despite the fact I will not be born until 5096. I am obviously a sadistic, goat-killing-" the noise started again. An angry scream, a threat, no doubt about it. With the myth of the Chupacabra now fermenting in her imagination, it chilled her spine and within a moment Oswin had returned to their side of the fence and was seeking solace by her sister, the superpowered one.

"There," Clara said in hardly a whisper, leaning as close to Oswin as she could possibly be to line up their vision and pointing to what she saw. A tiny black blob on the top of the nearest mountain, which was a damn sight nearer now than when they were a few miles away from it (though that was little more than basic maths). And it was moving. Oswin glimpsed it, and then it sank into the horizon just as the second scream subsided. "We should go."

"I agree with Clara," Oswin said, crossing her arms over and shifting her weight from one foot to the other every few seconds as a substitute for her usual pacing, while cyclically clenching and unclenching her fists, rather than talking energetically with her hands.

In an instant they were running. They had not found water, they had not found help, they had found a dead farm and a monster that was surely after them by now. They continued running for what felt like hours, panting and sweating in the stinging cold of the late-night desert, and she wondered if the gap year students might have a few salvagable firearms in their wreckage they could procure for defence against the beast. Chupacabra or not, there was something there.

They all arrived, terrified and sore, back at the campsite, where the others were all sat around a fire with more and more objects retrieved from the wreckage of the RV. Where the fire had sprung from, Clara did not know, but she thought it safest not the question the dream logic were it to abruptly cease its existence and leave them in a cold tizzy. Adam Mitchell remained slightly isolated from the other two, however. Whether this was because nobody really liked him or the remaining two were a couple, it was unclear. And they were drunk, and had a guitar from somewhere, which the other boy (who they now knew, from Cara, to be called Jake) was attempting to play in his stupor. Beer bottles lay empty and all over.

"I missed the party," Oswin said sadly.

"Perspective, Oswin! _Perspective_!"

"..._We_ missed the party..?" she said uncertainly and Clara sighed.

"We found the Chupacabra!" Cara exclaimed. Jake made a start and dropped his guitar in the dirt in front of him. Adam Mitchell was looking around at the three identicals (Cara, being a fair few years youger than the both of them was a lot less identical as far as identicalness went) and searching for a hint of irony.

"Seriously?" Jake asked.

"There are these goats, all of them slaughtered in a ranch back that way. And then it howled. Didn't you hear it howl?" Cara asked, crestfallen. Maybe the intoxication and the tuneless music had drowned out the call.

"Itchy Mitchy was singing," Jake said.

"No I wasn't," Adam Mitchell said. Clara didn't know how to tell if Adam Mitchell was lying or not, she didn't think she'd ever seen him lie. Unless he was always lying, and he was exceptionally dodgy.

"What did it look like? Did you see it?" the girl asked. The girl whose name Clara still did not know.

"It was on top of the mountain," Oswin said, "Clara saw it. And then it vanished."

"Vanished?" the girl asked.

"...Moved," Oswin corrected herself. "I would say it was chasing us." There was a silence over them for a few moments as the stared around and looked out for the Chupacabra, but there was nothing to be seen or heard.

"This is just our luck," Clara said bitterly. Oswin shared a look of mutual pity with her sister, and they both sighed in the exact same melancholic way, so identical were they that it sounded like one sound.

Cara recounted the Tale of the Chupacabra to the others, who had now pitched a tent. Oswin and Clara had their own conversations telepathically and decided they'd best pitch their own tent, which they did, Oswin directing. Clara remembered the only other time she had needed to pitch a tent with her sister, only a week prior, after the disastrous attempt to do it with the Doctor. Learning from that experience, Clara did everything Oswin told her to do. There were blankets, but no sleeping bags or airbeds. Just rock hard earth, and Clara was not looking forward to sleeping on it.

"I can't decide if this is better or worse than the tropical island," Clara said.

"Far worse, honey," Oswin answered from the other side of the canvas. She'd gone outside when Clara hadn't been paying attention, and now the latter ducked outside, too, and when to retrieve blankets from the back seat of the car. "We better have beds tomorrow."

"Maybe I'll sleep in the car," Clara grumbled. It was slightly warmer than the freezing outdoors, but she imagined if she slept in she would be dead from heat. Though tens weren't particularly temperature-resiliant either, come to think of it.

"Or maybe you should sleep where it's easier to get to you if we get attacked by a goat-killing monster," Oswin said.

"I don't see why you're so scared of it, you'll probably just end up comparing stories of your mutual hatred of goats," Clara said.

"I had an ordeal, Clara. How would you like it if the morning after your... Honeymoon, when you were locked in a hotel suite, Jack and Jenny set loads of savage ghostly goats on you? Hmm?" Oswin interrogated. It was a fair point, she supposed.

"How are you?" Clara asked. Oswin was taken aback.

"As in how? What do you mean?" she asked unsurely. Clara nodded past her in the direction of Adam Mitchell. Oswin glanced and turned back awfully quickly, "I'm fine."

"Are you sure you're fine? You do spend a lot of time trying to avoid him in reality," Clara said quietly.

"I'm glad of the break. This is still a break, just a reminder... His absence is refreshing," Oswin said, "And that is not him. That's a weird version of him with athlete's foot."

"Athlete's foot?"

"That's why they call him 'Itchy Mitchy'," Oswin whispered, nodding, "I heard Cara say it."

"Eurgh," Clara said. Oswin nodded again. "Anyway, are you definitely okay? Because if you're going to have some kind of breakdown-"

"Don't?" Oswin suggested flatly.

"_No_, warn me so I can make vast quantities hot chocolate and marshmallows appear out of thin air," Clara said. Oswin smiled, but then there were calls for spin the bottle from the students, so they tactfully slipped away into their tent to avoid the party games.

* * *

There was a noise like ripping fabric and there was a howl and then screams ringing out into the night, and Clara was awake and just as chilly as she had been before. Oswin was sitting up and staring, terrified, at the zipped up doorway to their tent. Neiter of them said anything and listened out intently, and there were sounds like running. But not human sounds of running, heavy-footed and almost scratch-like on the cracked ground outside. And then all was quiet for a few moments until they heard barking and yelping from the opposite direction to the footsteps. That was when Clara, though just as scared as Oswin at this point, unzipped the tent slowly and peered out and saw puce spatters.

"What is it?" Oswin whispered.

"An emergency. Shit. Come on," she beckoned behind her and stepped out of the tent to see Cara knelt next to Wolfy, who was yowling and holding his leg at an unnaturally obtuse angle, dripping blood. "Stars, what happened?" she kept her distance. The blood on the floor was the dog's, rather than anything human. It was still the middle of the night, and it was still ridiculously cold.

"Chupacabra, I told you," said Cara, sniffing slighty at the sight of her dog in such bad shape, and no immediate help in the vicinity. Apart from the genius they had with them. Clara looked around in the direction she had heard the footsteps go, but it was too dark to see anything. She sent out a blast of telekinetic energy to see if she caught anything, but the air ripple made a hum-like noise and was gone and useless straight away.

"Oswin?" Clara prompted, motioning to the suffering dog. "...Care to offer your genius services?"

"I... I don't know about medicine," she said quietly. "I'll try. I suppose." She returned to her curiously innocent tones and expressions of distractedness, the same as usual. She only seemed to be aware she was astonishingly intelligent when she wasn't doing something astonishingly intelligent.

Clara was of no use, so she went to give the busted Range Rover another once-over, peering under the seats. She retrieved the sonic from the glove box, but they had no phone. She scanned her memories for anything that could be helpful, staring at the screwdriver and wishing her husband's voice would float in from somewhere and tell him what, exactly, they were meant to do about a Chupacabra. And then she had an idea.

"Om-comm..." Clara said to herself, and then she sonicked the old radio in the car and shuffled into the seat when a feed came through and she laughed slightly at her own ingenuity. But who was she supposed to contact? She didn't have any idea where they were, except in the desert, and the desert was quite large. There was nothing anyone could do to help them without coordinates. Surely there'd be a local station though? She should at least alert the authorities to their presence in the desert.

She made the choice, while Oswin tended to the mauled dog a few yards away, to attempt to make radio contact with _someone_ at least. Maybe there was some way to get them noticed or make contact? Maybe a flare? She twisted dials and static came through, occasionally sounding more tuned depending which way she turned the knobs. And then a high-pitched screech came across and she hit the radio repeatedly until she found the right button and it switched off, her head feeling like something was drilling into it. She fumbled in her pocket and scrounged a cigarette out of it, lighting it and breathing in the smoke just as Oswin appeared.

"What was that noise!?" she demanded, and then she went on to say, "You're smoking again!? I didn't even-"

"I know you didn't, but... Well, you know... I just wanted a smoke, okay?" Clara said, "I didn't yesterday when I promised, did I?"

"...What was the noise?"

"Where's the dog?"

"The dog'll be fine, I tended to Wolfy, he's got a splint now," Oswin said, proud of her amateur veterinary work. Clara would be curious to what grade she would get on medical exams. She was sure if Oswin liked she could waste a day getting herself a PhD.

"I sonicked the radio and made it into an om-comm, but then that noise came over it," Clara told her. Oswin frowned at the radio and leaned over to switch it back on, and the screech came across for a second time and she jumped and slammed it off.

"Okay... Okay..." Oswin backed out and then started mumbling and pacing, Clara watching. "Can I borrow your screwdriver? I'll give you it back." Clara gave her the screwdriver and watched Oswin walk around and get in the driver's side on the right, and then she started examining the radio. "Do we have a phone?" Clara opened the glovebox, and found nothing in it except a cobweb.

"No," Clara said.

"Go see if any of them lot have a mobile," Oswin urged. Clara took her fags and returned to the camp site to find them all fawning over the limping but bound dog. If Clara were going to give her opinion on Oswin's job, she would say 'expertly done'. But then she was not a qualified vet, so she really had no idea.

"Do any of you have a phone?" Clara asked.

"Not one that'll make a call out here," Cara answered.

"Just a phone," Clara said, "Any phone."

There were wary glances, and Jake mumbled, "We don't even know who they are," and Adam Mitchell agreed with him instantly. But Cara ignored them, and passed Clara a Nokia 3210. She stared at it for a few moments.

"What year is it?" Clara found herself bemusedly asking, taking the phone and giving it the same perplexed examination.

"2014," Cara said.

"Okay..." Clara took the phone and walked away. Not a hint of irony or apology when Cara handed over the brick, it looked old too. Well, it probably was. She had just assumed people rarely had phones other than iPhones anymore, that seemed to be the case, especially with teenagers.

"I said a phone, Clara, not a... A... What is that?" she just stared at the Nokia.

"It's a phone. It was a phone. Fifteen years ago. Indestructable," Clara said, switching it on and having to squint in the darkness at the black on green. Oswin took it and held it in front of her for a few moments.

"It looks fragile," Oswin said, handling it carefully.

"You are from a different time period entirely. I was ten when these came out, they were all the rage in the noughties, and they are completely unbreakable," Clara said. Oswin just nodded like she didn't believe her. "Oswin, just do whatever you'd gonna do with it." Oswin sighed and and sonicked it, and then put it on the dashboard.

"Come help me with this," she said, "I have to take the radio out." Clara got back in the driver's side, and with their combined efforts and psychokinetic aid, they freed the entire, huge car part from the dashboard with just a few wires connecting it. And Oswin continued to take it apart, requesting that Clara float all of the parts in the air around her.

Eventually (truthfully it was less than ten minutes later), and after the retrieval of their car antenna and the large ariel from the top of the RV, she had built a device. Clara didn't know what it was or what it did, but she did know the handset part of it was not a lot bigger than the Nokia, but then it had alternative rotating rods on top of it, and to stop them getting stuck on your arm and head when you held it, it was required to be held it at arm's length. Oswin clicked on the radio, and there was a crackle of feedback. And then the crude manufacturing began beeping. Oswin beamed at it.

"What is it?" Clara asked.

"The noise you heard was a distress signal," Oswin said, "An SOS. This is a tracker, it's homing in on the signal if you give it a few minutes."

"You built a device to track down an alien distress signal out of a _car radio_ and a _Nokia_?" Clara asked incredulously. Oswin nodded and continued to smile, rather than boast, which is what she had come to expect from all the time she spent with her fake-sister.

"Yeah. It's coming from that way," Oswin pointed in the direction Clara had heard the footsteps pound away to, and where the mountain where the howl had come from was. Oswin continued to twist dials until the beeps became a higher and higher pitch, muttering something about precision. "You should put your cigarette out, it'll attract attention." Clara sighed, but could see the logic behind this, so she stamped out her cigarette and left the butt on the ground.

"And, um, what do you plan on doing when you find this Chupacabra, dear?" Clara asked with a trace of sarcasm.

"Speak to it," Oswin said. Cara snorted, as did Jake and Adam Mitchell. The other girl was still with Wolfy by the fire, and couldn't care less about Oswin's invention.

"And, what makes you think it won't try to kill you?" Jake asked.

"...Because it doesn't hurt people..." Clara said slowly, coming to the epiphony. Oswin nodded and carried on grinning.

"Exactly. It only hurts animals. No dead people on that ranch, were there? It could have killed any of us, but it went for Wolfy instead," Oswin said. "It's a shipwreck survivor. It needs to eat."

"So, you're saying, the Chupacabra, _the_ Chupacabra, is an alien?" Cara snorted.

"Oh, everything's an alien these days..." Clara said. Oswin laughed.

"1995," Oswin responded to Cara a few moments later, plainly thinking this to be an appropriate explanation. Nobody said anything, so she sighed and elaborated. "Well, there weren't any sightings until 1995. So that's when it crashed, obviously. Maybe there are a few of them, in escape pods, all around this general area."

"'This general area' being two continents?" Cara questioned. Oswin nodded.

"Well I've built a jam tracker now anyway," Oswin said, "I happen to be a genius. And we are going to go have a nice conversation with a goat killer, if any of you want to join us?" She motioned to herself and Clara.

"Someone has to stay with Wolfy," the other girl said, and then she said, "Jake?" who went and sat down by her and the dog's side. Clara supposed they _were_ a couple.

"Well I'll go," volunteered Adam Mitchell.

"Yeah why not," said Cara, shrugging. Oswin didn't say anything to object to either of the skeptics tagging along. They'd caught Jack the Ripper, retrieved the magic conch and now they were going to find the Chupacabra. What an eventful time they were having.

"What do you think it is?" Clara asked her sister. Cara and Adam Mitchell were hanging back and doing very little by way of conversation. They'd been walking, guided by Oswin's tracker, for almost half an hour.

"No idea," Oswin said. "There are intergalactic classification systems on planets and worlds and colonies," Oswin began on a seemingly unrelated note, but Clara said nothing and let her continue. "There are Shadow Proclomation scouts - not Judoon, that'd be ridiculous, they'd just shoot everything - that come down and study planets for areas of conflict and assess the political fragility of them. They make maps too, examine currencies and economies. Then they do population and species. They usually just check the Earth records for this stuff anyway, it's not too hard a job - not on this planet at least, it's only Level 5 in this century - but they still have to monitor it. One other thing they do is see which species is the dominant one."

"Humans, right?" Cara asked.

"No, there's this race of invisible bat fiends that live in clouds and use telepathic webs to control everything you do," Oswin said dryly. Clara snickered. Cara and Adam Mitchell thought she was serious.

"Really?" the latter asked.

"Why? You need more people to be racist to, do you?" Oswin snapped, then she turned back and carried on talking to Clara, calling back to Cara, "Yes, humans, obviously. If there was another race they wouldn't let you be so stupidly destroying your planet." She shot a look at Clara.

"I don't even live on this planet anymore, don't look at me," she said protectively. "I don't make my bed here."

"Yeah, we know where you make your bed..."

"Then where do you live..?" Adam Mitchell queried.

"On a spaceship, shut up," Clara sniped.

"Right. So, humans. The Shadow Proclomation know humans are the ones in charge, not goats or dogs or cows. They're classified as Low Threat Passive Natives. Humans are High Threat Hostile Natives. So're tigers and cobras and-"

"Hostile!?" Cara exclaimed.

"Yes, hostile, if you saw an alien you'd bloody shoot it," Oswin was getting more and more annoyed at these interruptions. "SO. They have these categorisations, and they get issued to a specific catalogue of races and planets just so they know. So, this Chupacabra will be from one of the planets the Shadow Proclomation deems peaceful, or intelligent. They have the lists, and they don't attack the humans, they go for these abundant low threat farm animals."

"Those animals are innocent! It's merciless!" Cara argued.

"Like _you_ weren't gonna slaughter and eat them _anyway_," Oswin said. "Clara what does meat taste like?" she asked abruptly.

"...Are you asking me another inappropriate question about my husband..?"

"On Horizon all our meat was dehydrated and months old," Oswin said.

"What about your milkshakes?"

"Nobody likes to speak about the milkshakes, honey," Oswin said quietly. And then she shut up and stopped asking odd questions about meat, and they continued walking in silence.

Soon enough, Oswin advised someone should turn on the lantern they'd brought so the Chupacabra would see them coming and wouldn't attack them in the dark for surprising it. She carried on an argument with Cara about it being a savage beast if it would just attack people, and she said if you got up in the middle of the night and found a random person in your house you'd probably thwack them with something, and ringing the doorbell was just common courtesy and manners.

They crept up the side of the mountain, holding the light out and following the bleeping of the tracker. The beeps kept increasing speed until they reached a cave about halfway to the summit, at which point the sound elongated into a high drone, and Oswin switched it off. They stared into the black cave and saw nothing in the gloom for a few moments, and then Oswin snatched Clara's lighter and thumped the metal of it onto the cave wall four times and then handed her it back. She supposed that was a knock on the door. Clara took the torch from Adam Mitchell and shone into the dark. She thought she saw far off flashing lights, but no sign of a Chupacabra.

"Abiding to the conventions set down by the Shadow Proclomation I request for you to state your species and place of origin," Oswin called ino the cave. Something moved. They waited until it came into view.

It looked to be scaly with a once dark shimmer and snake-like gleam to its skin, though it was now faded and a lot of the scales were chipped away from injuries and poor conduct, leaving yellow and blue flesh sore and weeping to the open air. It was stood on two legs but hunched over, its front arms long with three 'fingers' and what she imagined to be a 'thumb' protruding from what she would call, on a human, the bottom of their palms where hands met wrist. The arms were scaled too with the same blemishes running down them and malady. Its legs were bent low underneath its weight, looking withered and aching with huge claws coming from the three toes and the foot-thumb. The feet resembled the hands in almost every way, only these claws were dark, dirty yellow, split and swelling out of the cracks and around the base. They scraped along the floor as if it couldn't lift the full weight of its body and it made a creaking sound as it came toward them. It had patchy reddish fur across its back, where the sores were even worse and there were no scales, merely the dead hairs that wrapped down and around most of its back and chest, save for the head and limbs, giving it the look of a mange-ridden dog, but it was nearly twice the height of a normal person. Wings came spreading from its back, and it flapped them in a tiny movement as if to check they were still working, furled behind it and torn with a thick, blue-ish looking substance culminating and hardening on the wounds like they were scabs, or an infection of some kind. It breathed raspily and with the hoarseness of an elder, a gurgling rattle every time it inhaled and a painful gasp every time it exhaled. Spines ran, long and sharp as needles, from the top of its head all the way down its back to a base where there was a tiny, stubby tail of flesh where the spines were far shorter and less lethal looking. These spines looked like they were the only part of it not decayed, and they were all facing down in a manner similar to that of a horse's maine, but looking as if at the slightest provocation they would rise to full height, like a hedgehog. And then there was its head. Twice as big as a human's, with two huge eyes bulging out of it on either side with bright red, almost luminescent, pupils spanning out to take up the majority of the orbs, with a far paler, blue-streaked band wrapping around the edges in a circle, almost like it was bloodshot. Its jaw was huge, spanning from one huge ear to the other like a jagged, unnatural slash. Its teeth were rose stained and so large its mouth was always half open, revealing a thin, white tongue as the razor sharp teeth sat halfway up over the top of its snout-like face and into its vision. The sparse, rusty hair continued like bloody patchwork on its face, wet and dark near the mouth with the blood of what she assumed was Wolfy. Its ears were rounded in, large and bat-like, covered in flaking skin where it looked like hair had once been. And then there were the horns, ironically similar to those of the farm animals it was eating and curled like a corkskrew on its head, curving out and rounding back down in a reverse C-shape, the points almost meeting the base where it ended. Only one of the horns was broken clean off a quarter of the way past where it ended. It stood in the torchlight and breathed heavily, bristling its spines and always sounding like it was about to break into a coughing fit.

Cara looked like she was going to run screaming, and Adam Mitchell appeared to be about to faint. Even Clara was slightly petrified by the sight of the beast, but Oswin must have been right about it since it responded to the Shadow Proclomation.

"Zoriak, Finj, Fors'honiaa," it said. "Abiding to the conventions set down by the Shadow Proclomation I request for you to state your species and place of origin... Please." Please? It was a polite Chupacabra?

"Oswin, Human, Titan Colony Beta," Oswin said firmly. "It doesn't exist until 4889." Clara heard her thinking, trying to remember everything she could about the Finj and their home planet.

"Why are you here?" Clara asked when Oswin said nothing. The Chupacabra, or Zoriak, as it had named itself, turned its head to her and cocked it to one side, and then back to Oswin. "We're twins."

"There was a crash landing," Zoriak said in a husky voice, towering over them, but showing no contempt or rage.

"...When?" Clara asked.

"Almost twenty of your Earth years ago," Zoriak told her. He moved slightly and she tensed and became guarded, which he didn't seem to see, and then pointed lopsidedly into the back of his cave where the light didn't reach. He blinked for the first time, and she saw he had just one eye lid on each eye, folded up at the top and sliding down the entire pale-pink spheres to the bottom and spreading a milky-looking film over his cortex. And then he began to galumph into the cave, turning his shaggy, winged back and stumpy tail to them and shuffling away. Clara followed, assuming this was an invitation, dragging her unfocused sister with her.

"Was that... An alien!?" Cara squealed in a shrill voice.

"Be quiet, that's impolite," Oswin ordered her, returning from her brief daze of forced remembrance.

The cave was dark and the walls were wet and it stank of death and disease, and without the torchlight it was pitch black. Clara didn't know how Zoriak was seeing where he was going, he looked nearly blind. '_He can see in the dark. Like cats. That's why he only hunts at night_,' Oswin told her.

"How old are you?" Clara asked.

"I am thirty-six of your Earth years in age," he said, still with the death rattle in his lungs. He took a huge breath then and did a strange noise she guessed must be a Finj-equivalent of a hacking cough, before continuing.

"Are you okay?" Clara asked concernedly.

"It's a murderer!" Adam Mitchell declared.

"It's a 'he', and you're being racist again," Oswin said coldly to him.

"I kill not your people," Zoriak said, "I took the minimum I needed to survive." Clara had seen the state of the ranch, and the minimum seemed like quite a lot for the blood-sucker. Although seeing what a condition he was in, it wasn't hard to believe. A mood of sadness hung humidly in the cave.

"But are you well?" Clara continued.

"I have been suffering from your atmosphere for many years now," he said, gasping.

"You're sick," Clara said. "Is it... Fatal?"

"I know not, ..?" he said like he was missing a word. He turned his monstrous head and lolling jaw and teeth to look at her.

"Clara," Oswin said, "Her name's Clara." Zoriak nodded and turned back. How did he know of such Earth customs of saying 'please' and nodding? "And this is Cara, and this is Itchy Mitchy."

"Why is it called that?" Zoriak asked. Oswin glanced down at his flaky, peeling scales, skin being eaten away by the harsh air around them.

"...I don't know..." she lied innocently, "I hardly know him. He's Cara's friend."

"I'm a 'he' not an 'it'," Adam Mitchell said coldly to Zoriak, who seemed to give him a curious look. "Not like you, not a stinky... Bloody... Thing!" he said. There was a pause.

In a lightning-fast blur, Zoriak had Adam Mitchell pinned against the wall by his throat, a clawed hand clasped around him and lifting him more than two feet up the cave wall, and then he hissed, his terrifying features becoming even moreso, spines standing up all down his back and his pale, pointed tongue curling out, barring his teeth. Even his wings stretched out in the cave so that Clara ducked away from them. It happened far faster than any of his other movements so far.

"Please don't hurt him!" came two identical voices from either side of Clara, one from Cara, but one, far more worried one from Oswin, who was suddenly hysterical. Zoriak did not hurt Adam Mitchell, but stepped back and looked at Oswin, whose cry for mercy was far more pained and desperate than Cara's. Clara watched, trying to figure out what, if anything, she should do.

"He has disresepcted me, this is a crime by my laws," Zoriak said firmly. Oswin continued her disjointed pleading, and it was at the point where even Clara didn't know what she was saying.

"But you're on _our_ planet," Clara said finally, "And to kill him would... Would be an act of war, wouldn't it? We'll punish him by our own laws for this... um... injustice..." Zoriak dropped Adam Mitchell to the floor and Oswin instantly went to check if he was okay along with Cara.

"What are you doing? You don't even know him," Cara said, pulling Adam Mitchell away from Oswin. Clara brought Oswin to her feet, holding her arm. "What's wrong with you?"

"You should leave, Cara," said Clara, "You should take Adam and go."

"You're... You're crazy, both of you... Time travellers... Time streams... Alien husbands... How'd I even believe it!?" Cara exclaimed, dragging Adam Mitchell, who was being melodramatic and pretending his neck was broken.

"Get out, Cara," Clara ordered her, waving her hand and sending telekinetic energy at them, which knocked them both back a few steps in shock and awe, and Clara pointed them back to the wall, telekinetically bring the torch Cara had dropped into her sister-free hand. Cara and Adam Mitchell scarpered with a few curse words.

Zoriak watched them vanish and shook his head.

"I... Apologise," Clara said, "He's... Always like that as far as I know."

"It is he who should apologise," said Zoriak in a gravelly voice, and then he carried on walking. 'Are you okay, Oswin?' Clara thought. Oswin thought nothing back, but was maybe shaking slightly. 'If that was the Doctor, I mean, even if it was some twisted version of him, and I wasn't even married to him or any of that... Well... I'd probably've done the same...' '_I'm not in love with him._' 'No, I know. I'm just offering my opinion.'

The cave didn't do anything creative like open into a huge cavern with a giant crashed spaceship in it or anything, just widened a little and then ended with a battered, charred escape pod. The walls were covered in a thick, slime-like substance she could only liken to spider webs or slug trails, only matted and unformed and slimy, and it was hanging from everywhere and letting off a foul, pungent aroma. The escape pod didn't look big enough to fit Zoriak in it, but it had the seat wrenched out and propped up on the floor by a few rocks. This was where Zoriak went to sit, and Clara decided, _what the hell?_, and levitated herself into a cross-legged sitting position. And she also had to levitate Oswin up too, but Oswin kept bobbing like they were in water and it turned out to be tricky to get the hang of.

"Why isn't your distress signal working?" Clara asked, "Why haven't any of your species come and rescued you?"

"We were shot down," Zoriak said, "There were eight of us who reached the escape pods. Three of them deceased on entry to your planet. Two more deceased since."

"So there's only three of you left?" Clara asked. Zoriak nodded and she smiled a little when she next asked, "How do you know how to nod and say please?"

"I have studied your peoples' customs and languages if I ever needed to communicate," Zoriak told her and she just nodded.

"I like you, you're quite cool," she said. Zoriak said nothing in response to this. "That's a good thing. Anyway, didn't you... Meet up? Or find each other?"

"It was unsafe to travel such distances. We keep in radio contact."

"But I still don't understand why nobody's rescued you yet," Clara asked. Oswin now looked less distressed, but her eyes were glazy and staring at the wall and she was clutching Clara's hand so tightly her knuckles were white and Clara's fingertips were blue.

"We were shot down," Zoriak repeated.

"By who?"

"An old rival race," he said sadly, "A war began. They are blocking the ships passage. We are stranded here until death."

"Or until the war ends," said Oswin quietly. Clara looked to her furtively, but she was still gazing off into the distance.

"The war will never end," said Zoriak, "Not in my lifetime. I have little time left." Clara felt a pang of sadness for Zoriak and his fate, and the fact his appearance and very nature was so tragically monstrous, only experienced people like herself and her sister would bother giving him the time of day. He had not attacked them, he had been polite. He had attacked Wolfy, but then perhaps he didn't understand the sentimentality of a dog, or pets.

"I'm sorry," Clara sympathised. Zoriak sighed, and bowed his great head in his cave. She wondered what he had looked like when he hadn't been disease ridden and stranded. If they had the TARDIS, she would merely offer to take him home. But there was no TARDIS.

Zoriak then stuck out one of his legs completely staight and pulled a face that might be a wince of pain. She looked at his leg and saw a bright blue gash running the length of his knee to his ankle, slightly green in colour as well, around the edges.

"That looks painful," Clara commented on it.

"I suffered an injury at the nearby establishment," he meant the massacred ranch, "They were waiting for me. Your people have cruel weapons, Oswin."

"I'm Clara," corrected him. He looked sad. "Don't worry, only my husband can tell the difference perfectly. Or so he says, even then I doubt it." Oswin's gaze had shifted from the slimy back wall to Zoriak's leg.

"That's infected," Oswin said blandly, her terrible bedside manner resurfacing. Zoriak neither denied nor accepted this statement, just remained solemn. He blinked again, a carried on his strained breathing. "It's... I... Sorry..."

"What?" Clara asked her. Oswin merely looked morosely at Zoriak and they shared a look she didn't understand. One of deeply scarred self-pity, so far gone it became pity for those around them suffering as well. A selfish kind of sorrow. '_He's dying._' 'I... Well... How long..?' '_Hours._' Clara was the compassionate one, that was now clear, when Oswin couldn't think of anything else to say and merely remained with Clara's hand in a vice. Something was upsetting her more than Zoriak the Chupacabra's tragedy. "Tell us a story," Clara asked, forcing a small smile.

"A story?"

"A tale, a recollection. An adventure," her eyes lit up with blue sparkles, "Just... Tell us about yourself. Your life. Anything."

"I... I suppose..."

"Just anything."

Clara did not see the sunrise in the dark cave they were secluded in. Once Zoriak began the recount of his life and told them stories of young love and acts of petty rebellion and how strange he thought narcotics were, he didn't stop. Floodgates of life were opened, and in Clara's mind an image ghosted over him of his young, well self, no scars or scrapes or sickness, like a distorted ripple in a pond or a half-developed photograph. He had been involved in a heroic dog fight, sending him crashing to Earth after steering his way into desolation and red sand. He said he thought the sunset was beautiful. He described his home planet, his run-ins with humans, every little thing about him came spilling out, Clara having to give him appropriate words at some points when the English escaped him and his crudely American accent, after picking up the language from them. He asked about accents and where she was from, she said a sopping wet island where it rained every day, in a house by the sea. Eventually Oswin started listening and told of the yellow planet below her space station with its moons and asteroid belt, and how sometimes you would go stand in front of a bay window and a rock would fly straight for you, and you'd think it were going to shatter the glass, but a forcefield disintegrated it just in time and dust blew back out into orbit again.

Time was a blur. Soon enough, Zoriak drifted off into a slumber. Zoriak did not wake up.


End file.
